Magicians Nephew : Putting it Together

Hi I'm Jim i live in New York and I like to read books.

Getting older getting a little slower but still reading.

Retired computer geek and Big Picture "Software architect" makes you think I must know something. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Love the theatre for how it makes me feel , love American History for what it teaches us about us.

"Putting it Together" is a song by the late Stephan Sondheim from his wonderful " Sunday in the Park with George".

Still working on putting it together in my life. Come along, maybe you can help. Lurkers welcome. Shirkers not.

White. A blank page or canvas. His Favorite. So many possibilities.

Hiyeee!

This group always helps me to read; welcome back, Jim.

Welcome back! I hope your 2022 reading is great.

Hi Jim, Happy new year, and happy new thread! Here's to good reading in 22.

Dropping a star (even as a lurker). Happy New Year, Jim.

Happy reading in 2022, Jim!

Enjoy your 2022 reads!

Happy New Year and happy new thread, Jim!

Jim! Hi. Bill here. Say hi to Judy for me.

Read on, read on.

Happy New Year, Jim! I hope you have a great reading year in 2022.

Happy New Year, Jim. Have a great bookish year.

Happy ‘22, Jim!

We miss getting to your city for theater. Pandemic begone!

Wishing you a great reading year, Jim, and lots of theatre.

So where was I?

Sometimes it's fun to read two books (or more) at the same time and see how each book flavors the other one. That's what I've been going the last few days.

One of Us is Lying is a YA (Young Adult) book with an almost classic set up.

Five high school kids - the female Brainiac, the Sports Star, the "rebel" and the Nice girl - and one other - are sent to detention on what may be a phony charge. While in detention one of the boys - the unpopular unlikable one - drinks water laced with peanut oil (he's allergic) and goes into analaphaletic shock and dies. Murder? Maybe.

But it's really just the cusp event that makes the other four look at their lives and learn and maybe change and grow.

Lovely writing interesting characters. Nothing new here really, but a tale well told and hurrah for that. Perhaps a tad too long but what would you cut? I dunno.

Enjoyed it.

“We’re All Pretty Bizarre. Some Of Us Are Just Better At Hiding It; That’s All.”
– Andrew Clark. "The Breakfast Club"

Very interesting. Classic theme of high school detention, a normal thing that -- as other "usual" things -- is sometimes so powerful it can change the characters' lives.

I'm interested in what is the second book you've been reading and how do you see those two together.

(Nice quote! I think I've heard somewhere of that book...)

>17 zuzaer: well the "other" book for the last week or so was The Thursday Murder Club another book about a group of near strangers -- archetypes in their ways -- thrown together under pressure to solve a life threatening mystery in a small controlled community that they're not particularly in in control of.

This book has been much talked about on the LT community and I had to give it a try. Had to say sometimes the level of "Twee" got awfully high, and sometimes the level of pacing got awfully slow, but the characters grew on me and the story engaged me and i was happy i stuck to it to the finish.

We watch "New Tricks" on the "British Detectives" channel of our Roku box, and enjoy seeing the older "Black Sheep" ex-detectives dig in in their crotchety old ways and solve case after case. This book sort of reminded me of that. I hear there's a sequel and I'm going to slot it in early rotation in my To Be Read queue.

"A good friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move a body.
-- Steven Daniels

So, two books on murder and mystery, and near strangers set to solve the problem.

And sometimes not so well written books are exactly what suits us (in a specific moment or by their overall mood.)

>18 magicians_nephew: I would consider The Man Who Died Twice less twee than the first one. I thought the both of them were fun reads.

What Meg said, Jim. You’ll enjoy The Man Who Lived Twice.

Thanks for stopping by, you two. Happy New Year!

Last year in the height of pandemic isolation I threw my book group into a Michael Chabon book The Yiddish Policeman's Union and we had a great time talking about it.

So one year later (and it feels like yesterday) I pointed them at another Chabon, Wonder Boys and I'm here to report that a good time was had by all.

Sometimes I think too many writers write a first book, get stuck, and then write their second about about how hard it is to write a second book. (or movie. cf. "8 1/2")

So OK. "Wonder Boys" is about a novelist who had one great book, and is now stuck on page three thousand and something of his second book , also called "Wonder Boys"

The author in question is a strange bird, heavily into shagging other men's wives and smoking dope. And I thought, no really? This is your second book, Michael Chabon?

But then he finds his legs out in the stretch turn and has lots of funny true, great things to say about Writing, and Writers, and writers in academia, and families, and relationships in general.

There is a set piece in the middle of the book where Our Hero goes to a Passover Seder at his in-laws house, and the tradition and the family stuff is just amazing. And there are some great characters that are just so true and honest and so unique and original, you have to take your hat off.

And you know, there is a happily ever after, and the author sort of grows up, and sort of learns to clean up after himself, and wonder of wonders, finishes his book.

Chabon has written so much good stuff. This may be an Amuse bouche and not a Main Course, but i'm here to tell you it's very tasty stuff indeed. Enjoyed it. Go read it.

“Writing is like driving at night. You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow

Just takin a day or two to recharge and have a look at a pair of old friends in new surroundings.

Death of a Dude is a Nero Wolfe mystery but a very atypical one. Archie and Wolfe find themselves miles away from West 35th Street, on a ranch in Wyoming, trying to break a tough murder case open there.

It's fun to see Wolfe away from his usual surroundings - no office no red leather chair, no Fritz or Theodore - and fun to see Wolfe and Archie try to make headway when they are the "Dudes" and the outsiders.

There is a new cast of characters some quite interesting and some lovely set pieces where Wolfe speaks his mind about American literature and other topics.

The mystery is solved of course, through routine detective work and some Wolf-ish insights, and they both heave a sigh and return to the canyons of New York. An outlier for the Wolfe corpus, but a fun one. Recommended.

Popping in to keep current and say Hi! I have yet to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. Do I have to start at number 1?

>24 Berly: It helps to read the Nero Wolfe books in order but its not necessary.

The early ones are i think deeper and a little more psychological in nature with complex and human villains. The books during World War II are very passionately anti-communist, but its works just fine.

Later books are more playful and some are downright comedies. But they're never worse than good and some of them are just about wonderful

He's wonderful and witty about the book publishing world - two of them Murder by the Book and Plot it Yourself are among the best of the lot

>25 magicians_nephew: Book publishing world crime stories? I'm in! (Already in the wishlist)

Wishing you a wonderful weekend, Jim.

Just catching up. Sometimes books are like that apple that fell out of the tree and conked Sir Isaac - out of the blue, and mind boggling.

We read Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World a recent book by a Turkish-English author.
(Hmm, no touchstone?)

Leila grows up in a traditional Turkish family in a small town near Istanbul. She soon tires of the restricted life of a girl child at home and runs away to become a prostitute in Istanbul. In an act of random senseless violence, she is murdered.

The Ten minutes 38 seconds is the time it takes her mind and her body to die. In that short time she calls up memories of her childhood and her brief life and her friends and her family. It's a great story and if you don't know a lot about Istanbul, quite an eye opener. You can almost taste the spices and smell the ocean.

It's an angry book about the Turkish society and a joyful book too. The writing is magical. The characters stay with you.

If you havn't read any good Turkish novels recently you might give this one a try.

“For the story is not ended
And the play never done
Until all of us have been burned a bit
And burnished by the sun.
-- Tom Schmidt

Nothing like having a book in hand that you are supposed to read to make you go and read ANYTHING ELSE but.

My book group is taking a look at "Crime and punishment" this coming Monday and what am i reading this week? The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie.

I find most of the Poirot books obvious and more than a little bit racist but you know, once in a while.

This book shows up Good Old Hastings looking up Poirot in retirement and just hoping that a tricky little puzzle style murder mystery will turn up.

And it does - a twisty series of murders with an "A-B-C' alphabet motif, which everybody (and the reader) latches onto and chases eagerly.

Only our Man Hercule Poirot sees past the "puzzle" smokescreen to the real case and the real murderer.

My favorite Christie's are the meta ones where she is telling the story but looking over our shoulders and sort of giggling at the conventions of the "Agatha Christie" style murder mystery while simultaneously turning them on their heads.

This one was like that. .

“Elementary,” said (Holmes). “It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction".
-- Conan Doyle

I can see how having Crime and Punishment to read would get you to opt for The ABC Murders instead. Death of a Dude looks interesting, a rare look at Wolfe without his orchid retreat.

Thanks for dropping by Meg.

Malcom Gladwell is a strange duck He writes about systems and processes looking at history and psychology and social science. Some of his books have driven me right up the wall.

But I was curious about his The Bomber Mafia a new book about the use of airplanes for military attack, in World War I and II.

Along the way he runs a thoughtful and even handed eye over Curtis LeMay, who commanded Army Air in Europe and against Japan. (LeMay was later tapped to be a Vice Presidential candidate alongside George Wallace, but you shouldn't hold that against him).

Gladwell talks about the invention of napalm, and its use in firebombing military and civilian targets in Japan. It's a fascinating story. Some believed in "Precision Bombing" focusing on only military targets. Some believed in bombing widely and in depth - military civilian and all - as a "humanitarian" way of shortening the war.

Can you fight a way half way? or is the only way to fight a war - to win it? LeMay didn't have a heck of a lot to do with the decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan, but it's fascinating to note they picked Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two of the very few cities in Japan that had not already been burned to the ground by LeMay's B-29's.

A graceful book about men and systems and the theory and practice of war. Not sure I can recommend it to any but die-hard historians. I enjoyed it.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
-- William Tecumseh Sherman

Hi - Crime and murder don't draw attention, but WONDER BOYS I will look for on Abe.com.

For espionage, DEFENDING THE ROCK is a scary non fiction one and THE 1619 PROJECT is a five star U>S> history.

From the New Yorker. About how I feel these days reading the news

>34 magicians_nephew: I feel that way about a lot of celebrities.

>34 magicians_nephew: Quite right, Jim!

Nice to see you in these parts, Paul.

Ann Patchett is such a lovely graceful lady in person that's it a joy to report she is one heck of a good writer too. Our book group took a look at The Magician's Assistant one of her early books, and we had a great time with it.

Sabine is the Magicians Assistant (and married to) the amazing Parsifal, a magician in Los Angelos. They have a great and loving partnership and relationship until unexpectedly, he dies of a brain aneurism.

And thats how the story begins. In reading the will, Sabine discovers that Parsifal had kept many secrets, including a family he had run away from in Nebraska many years ago.

Almost against her will, Sabine reaches out to her husbands long lost family and uncovers secrets and scandals - and love - long hidden away.

But this is Sabine's story, not Parsifal's. Sabine learns and discovers new things in herself and goes through grief and anger and longing to - perhaps - a new beginning. And a new hope with secrets and without illusions.

Packet is such a lovely writer and she creates characters that live and struggle and stay with you. And this book will stay with you too, I think.

“Spring is not a season; it is a mysterious illusionist who sets off fireworks in the depths of our soul!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

On advice of counsel (Dr. Neutron to be exact) I downloaded and dived into King Richard and I'm here to give testimony - on Deep Background, of course.

Watergate is a story that endlessly fascinates. (Thing were simpler then, I think.) Fred Emery's Watergate was the first book i saw that really read all the tape transcripts and all the memoirs and stitched it together into one coherent story.

Now Michael Dobbs has done much the same thing - chronicling the tapes and the stories into a step by step story. The value add here is a knowing sympathy, a real compassion for Richard Nixon and his rough childhood and the many slights and insults that shaped his personality into paranoia and fear. In foreign policy he did a lot fo remarkable things. But Domestic Affairs bored him and, well, you know what happened.

The curious thing about this book is its scope - the author limits himself to the one hundred days between Nixons second inauguration and the beginning of the Senate Watergate Hearings. Why stop there? I guess we know the ending, but still.

And Dobbs sees Watergate as a "Tragedy"?. I dunno. Did Nixon and his men rise and then fall from a height due to hubris and a fatal flaw? Ok.

Enjoyed it. Wished there was more.

With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.
-- William Shakespeare, "Othello"

>37 magicians_nephew:. That's a nice review of Magician's Assistant. Definitely a book I remember enjoying.

>33 m.belljackson: Very curious about The 1619 Project. I've only seen bits and pieces of this that appeared in the Times.

Not sure I agree that all of American History must be filtered through the rotting linen lens of slavery. But we will see.

History is always fascinating. This little story is making the rounds i guess about Putin. The earliest citation I can find for this is during FDR's second term

A man goes to a newsstand and buys a newspaper…
He then glances at the front page, then turns aside and tosses the whole newspaper straight into the trash.

Next day, he turns up, and does the same thing. Buys it, glances at the front page, throws it in the trash.

Next day, same thing. The newsstand worker is increasingly puzzled, but doesn't say anything.

But eventually, after a couple of weeks of this, he can't take it. "I'm sorry, friend, but I must ask: why do you buy the paper every day and then just look at the front page and throw it out?"

"Oh, I'm just checking for something."

"OK, but: what are you checking for?"

"I'm checking for a particular obituary."

"But sir, you don't even open the newspaper! The obituaries aren't even on the front page!"

"Oh, believe me, the one I'm waiting for will be."

Learned on Judy's thread that you are both down with the dread COVID. Sending healing wishes your ways dear fellow get well soon.

hope you feel better soon!

Hi Jim!

Nero Wolfe and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World. Both excellent in their way. Christie, too. The touchstone for the Shafak book is touchy, but findable.

>37 magicians_nephew: Sigh. I still have The Magician’s Assistant on my shelves, still want to read it. Thanks for the review.

>42 PaulCranswick: and >43 banjo123: What Paul and Rhonda said.

Dang it! Not you, too? Best wishes for a quick COVID recovery.

Thanks to all for the good wishes.

Hard to describe the feeling of getting the email with your COVID test results and having it say in big red letters "POSITIVE". (And we were so CAREFUL!).

We were lucky to have a good doctor who immediately prescribed anti-virals and kept us home and safe and not panicking until the whole thing blew over. (We Think).

Both Judy and I knew people who died in the first rush of COVID back in the day. So there was that too.

Hearing everyone talking about dropping mask mandates and other measures makes me uneasy - this thing ain't over.

And so it goes.

>46 magicians_nephew: First of all, belated sympathy on the covid diagnosis, and I'm very glad to hear that you are recovered or at least recovering.

I don't think covid will ever be over; it'll just become something humanity has learned to live with, one of those things that routinely kills off old folks and the immune-suppressed, as well as a sprinkling of others. Evolutionary pressures will carry off those with extreme inherited vulnerability, and everyone else will have been exposed in childhood, as well as vaccinated.

Your great grandchildren, or perhaps great great grandchildren, will speculate about why people got so upset about a routine childhood illness, and half the dissertations their scholars produce on the topic would seem extremely clueless to those of us who lived through the pass two years, if any of us were still around to read them.

well, I'm back.

Dipping into the Audible versions of several Agatha Christie novels and came upon The A B C Murders which features good Hercule Poirot and a plat that is a corker - so much of a corker that it has been "borrowed" and reused by dozens of other murder mystery shows and books ever since.

Poirot has been asked to hunt a "serial Killer" someone who is going around killing people by alphabet, first an "A", then a "B" then a "C" -- or is he?

Good old Captain Hastings wants to see Poirot solve a tricky murder with red herrings and obscure clues and all the bells and whistles. It Takes Poirot, bless him to see past all the smoke and mirrors and really figure out who the murder really is.

Had fun with it. The Audible reader did a good job.

Jim, Your most recent audile version of Agatha Christie's A B C Murders sounds interesting! I confess, while I have many of Will's Agatha Christie books, I haven't read them. I hold on to them though.

>48 magicians_nephew: Good to see you back, Jim.

I think too many people remember Carl Sagan only for his goofy "Billions and Billions" on "Cosmos" But he was a teriffic scientist and a teriffic writer too.

Neal Adams came to DC comics in his 20's when Batman was a "Campy" costumed detective with the personality of a block of Velveeta.

As a writer and an artist Neal Adams took Batman back to his '30's pulp roots, making him an angry obsessive avenger, a grim and scary figure, almost as crazy as the Joker himself.
Neal Adams' vision of Batman is largely what you see in the current DC Movies.

Neal Adams died this weekend. Going to miss him.

Hi Jim!

>48 magicians_nephew: I’m so glad you’re back! I’m beginning to realize that being oh, so careful, doesn’t necessarily make any difference any more, but getting vaccinated and boostered certainly contributes to not ending up in the hospital and possibly on a ventilator. We’ve still dodged it, and I’m even more grateful because I went to a young cousin’s wedding shower two Saturdays ago and that’s the most people I’ve been around since before March of 2020.

Nothing wrong with a good Agatha Christie to while the time away.

>51 magicians_nephew: Excellent quote, fun way to see a book described as a flat object made from a tree…

Historical novels are always tricky. Do you respect the history, or tell the story? or Both?

My book group took a look at Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell's deep dive into the life and times of a glovers family in Stratford England that may be the family that produced William Shakespeare.

The story centers not on the reedy, bookish youth they call "The Latin Tutor" but on Anne(Agnes) his wife and their children, including the boy Hamnet who dies tragically at the age of 11.

My historian's antennae found little to twitch at here - O'Farrell has done her research into this town and this period, and she has woven her research into a vibrant, living story full of real complicated people with deep and complex stories to tell.

It's a book to be cherished, graced with lovely writing and exquisite set pieces. There's going to be a movie, i betcha, and I will be the first on line to see it.

Recommended.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
-- Christopher Marlowe

>54 magicians_nephew: My historian's antennae found little to twitch at here Mr SandDune suffers from that constantly. I'm less likely to notice small factual inaccuracies, but I hate it when it just feels wrong. When you have obviously 21st century people plonked down in whatever century it's supposed to be.

>55 SandDune: Thanks for stopping by, Riann. I remember watching the movie of "The Imitation Game" and enjoying the heroic portrayal of Alan Turing by Benedict Cumberbatch while wincing again and again at the (MANY) historical inaccuracies

History is tricky. When you're a country like America that has had a few wars go south - sometimes very badly - it's natural to reach back to grasp the last war where things sort of went right. And Tom Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation about the time when America united and marched off to war to stop Fascism and bring liberty to the oppressed and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

A lot of that is true -- and good. But some of it - i say only some of it - is wish fulfillment and willful blindness.

Looking for the Good War was written by a scholar who teaches at West Point to give an "on the other hand" viewpoint. For the historian - maybe not much new here. But it will be news for some people that many American opposed the war even after Pearl Harbor, and that some people dissented and even struck to shut down industry in the height of the war.

The post war cinema has much in common with the post Vietnam cinema - the lone drifter, "of course" a veteran - who may do good and may do ill with his "Skills" and his experience in killing. The post war literature, too. Lew Archer was a World War II veteran. He wasn't the only one.

As Professor Samet is quick to say, Yes we went off to war and Yes we freed Europe from the threat of fascism and Nazism and Yes America became a great power on the strength of it. But it isn't quite that simple, really. And perhaps hanging on to the myth of the "Good War" (Studs Terkel put it in querulous quote marks in his book) has something to do with the stumbles caused by our combined naiveté and arrogance in wars post 1945.

A thoughtful book. A Scholar's book. Worth a read.

next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims and so forth
-- e. e. cummings

>57 magicians_nephew: One more for my ever-growing TBR list. Thank you.

There were not a lot of books in the house when i was growing up. I remember the first time I visiting our local library - i wanted to just start at the shelves by the door and just read everything they had.

And there are Agatha Christies and there are Agatha Christies.

Death on the Nile is classic Poirot - the murderer kills a good friend for reasons that seem more to do with making an interesting plot than in writing about real people.

And the murderer has one of those "Unbreakable alibis" that Poirot is fond of breaking - again people don't much really act like this outside of the clockwork of the mystery novel.

Probably best seen now as a travelogue of how rich people visited the sights of Egypt back in the day. It passed the time

"Very curious, very curious," said Passepartout to himself, on returning to the steamer. "I see that it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new."
-- Jules Verne

>48 magicians_nephew: Welcome Back!!!!

Wordle 332 4/6

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and sometimes the answer just falls into your lap

Sometimes its just fun to pull a rusty dusty book off the not looked at very much shelf and give it a go.

And sometimes those books are on that shelf for a reason.

Our Book Group took a look at The Good Soldier Svejk billed as a classic anti war novel from World War I.

and OK. Parts of it are pretty funny in a silly slapstick sort of way. Our boy Svejk (His name has passed into the language in Czech as a synonym for incompetence) runs around in the army as chaplain's clerk and batman and whatever else he falls into. He never gets within shouting distance of any fighting, and like Catch 22 the book is as much an anti war book as it is a satirical attack on government bureaucracy.

Is Svejk the biggest idiot walking? Or the smartest guy in the army at staying alive and out of danger? Hmm.

But he never really develops as a character and he is deep compared to some of the cardboard cutouts running around in here, and the book goes on forever and hits every nail with every hammer until it makes your head hurt.

Glad to have this one checked off. But ain't a gonna ever read it again. Or recommend it. Don't make me come down there.

This made me laugh.

>63 magicians_nephew: Jim, lately I've randomly pulled books off the shelves. I'm finding many I purchased on a whim long ago. I start to read the book, and realize I am no longer interested in this author or subject. I've given away hundreds thus far this year. If feels good to downsize.

>65 Whisper1: Congrats. I hope to do some of that myself, if I can control my urge to just borrow ever more from the library, ignoring those on my shelves.

One of the joys of Library Thing is the active and engaged community. The other day on Joe's thread he pointed out the Kindle Daily Deal was John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

which immediately triggered me to read in one (large) gulp the three books of the "Smiley Trilogy" (The Smiley characters appears in other books besides theses, of course).

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a modern classic, with pulse pounding field agent adventure mixed in with the organizational in-fighting and the cruel office politics of the "Centre" the home office of British Intelligence. Full of terrific characters and an urgent, driving mystery plot, Smiley is called back to service to root out the "mole" the lover-betrayer who has turned the Service inside out. Even having read it a dozen times before i turned the pages quickly to get to that last scene of understanding and acceptance as the villain is exposed.

Then we come to The Honorable Schoolboy. Le Carre loves to bring back minor characters from previous books and this one brings in Jerry Westerby, an "old Circus Hand" to try to carry the fight to "Karla" the Masterspy of Moscow Centre. The author has rare sympathy for men, no longer young, who continue to fight and struggle for the country and the cause they once upon a time believed it.

And then at last to Smiley's People the final chapter which pits a driven and angry George Smiley and his Over the Hill Gang against Karla one last time. Here we see Smiley himself out in the field investigating, thinking moving, taking action. It's fascinating to see Smiley in the field using his old tradecraft to evade capture from police and enemy agents in several countries. This isn't James Bond swinging from a cable car. This is an old man in a rented car who finds the dogs after him and has to lay out false trails to outwit them. Spoiler alert: He does.

The ending of the book and the series is bittersweet. He has won - but has he after all won anything? It's over. Maybe that's enough of a victory at a certain age.

Still coming up for air. Three book like three stiff drinks.
This isn't a spy novel - this is literature.

And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win."
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."
-- Robert Southey

I have read a total of zero Le Carre books. But I feel like I really should

Just a friendly Hello! Hope you are enjoying summer and some great reads.

>59 magicians_nephew: LOL. I loved visiting libraries as a kid. I don't do it as much as an adult. Even though it is so easy to order everything on line, I kinda miss the actual building.

Happy weekend!

>64 magicians_nephew:. Love it!

Hi, jim. Debbi recommended 10 Minutes 38 Seconds to me, and I’m glad I read it. Good to see that it worked for you.

I loved Hamnet, and it sounds like it went over well with your book group.Her new one, The Marriage Portrait, has been getting a lot of good reviews.

Hello Joe and thanks for dropping by.

The Patience of Ordinary Things

by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

From Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2005).

Trust Exercise is a book that starts out slow and easy and then sneaks up on you for an amazing conclusion.

The first third of the book is a novel really almost a rom-com, about teen agers at a school for performing arts in Houston, and their lives and loves. There are some dark moments, and our lead couple has some ups and downs, but it's just a story, you know? To be honest I thought some of this dragged a bit and could have been edited down. This is the story from Sarah's point of view.

THEN Part 2 is from "Karen's" point of view and wow is it different. There were real horrors in that few years of high school, sexual abuse and manipulation by people in power, and unlike Sarah Karen is not willing to let anybody off the hook. This is first person singular and a woman on a mission to set things straight. We see a lot of the characters from Part I but from a different point of view, much sharper, less soft focus. There is anger here and violence -- and truth.

The third part of the book is a brief coda, looking back from years later at some of the same people and some of the same stories.

So its our old friend the Unreliable Narrator, and a question. Are these stories that Sarah and Karen chose to tell, or the stories they needed to tell, just to get on wiht their lives? Looking back on sexual abuse is hard - and ain't pretty. And being honest about what happened and you did about it isn't always pretty either.

A powerful book that took home a National Book Award. I loved it. You should have a look.

Then there was school,
the little straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over,
but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn’t work.
my arms, and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
-- Ann Sexton

>72 magicians_nephew: Adding to my wishlist, you convinced me. It'll be interesting to compare this (as a book about teenagers/YA) with "Normal People", although they talk aout slightly different things.

>73 zuzaer: Thanks for stopping by zuzaer! Yes the first part could have been a YA book now that i think of it

>74 magicians_nephew: I'm not sure whether there is a difference in "books for YA" and "books about YA" in some cases, but I'm probably at the age where "high school" still speaks "I'm for YA" to me.

Back in the day a man who rejoiced in the name William S. Baring-Gould wrote a truly amazing book called Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: a Life of the World's First Consulting Detective. And its really good.

In it he took all the Holmes stories and went through them as if they were Holy Writ - teasing out the chronology and the little asides to build a full and lovely biography of the beloved detective. Where did he grow up? Where did he go to school? How did he become a detective? and a thousand other delicious details.

When did Holmes and Watson cross paths with Oscar Wilde? Who was the King of Bohemia, anyway? How many wives did Watson have, really? and who was who? and when?

Taking it totally seriously but also with a little twinkle in his eye and a love for the stories that every reader could identify with.

So, alas a man named Nick Rennison has come out with Sherlock Holmes: the Unauthorized Biography and it is dull and dry and just a shame. Kept trying to read it just out of love of Holmes but couldn't do it.

If you can't get your mitts on the Baring-Gould you could try to read the Rennsion. But you would come up disappointed. I did.

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
-- A. Conan Doyle

>76 magicians_nephew: Baring-Gould's work sounds impressive and inspiring. Well, he may be teasing, but I bet you could feel his love for the character while reading, couldn't you? Because it takes a die-hard fan to write such a book.

The historian's curse. Tell people you're reading a book about Benjamin Disraeli and you might get a "Why?" but you're much more likely to get a "Who?".

The book is Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy who Became Prime Minister and the title is sort of a head-scratcher. Victorian Dandy? Really? That's what you're leading with?

Disraeli was the first Jewish born Prime Minister of England (his family converted to Christianity when the boy was 4) and his years were a time of great change in the latter half of the 19th century.

Hard to believe that prior to 1867 the Vote in Great Britain was strictly limited to the wealthy and those owning land. Disraeli's "Reform Act" of 1867 opened up the franchise to (with some exceptions) all Adult Males. Holy Cow!

The book is good about how bitterly this was fought over - with others stating in public that "the great mass of uneducated Men" could NOT govern and would not govern, except to vote themselves Bread and Beer from the public purse. They might even demand that the standard working day be reduced to only eight hours. Mirable dictu!

Coming so soon after the Civil War the Act was seen as freeing the (wage) slaves as Lincoln freed the Black slaves in America.

The book has a lot to say about anti-semitism in England at that time, and it's still a story worth telling. Dizzy was called "That Smelly Old Jew" in the House of Commons, and worse in the streets. But he charmed the pants off the Queen and her court, and he got by. And changed the kingdom.

At a time when England may be getting her first East Asian Prime Minister, reflecting on her first Jewish PM may be worth a moment here.

There are so many great quotations from Disraeli it was hard to pick just one.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

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Took six today and i was lucky to get that

Wow, the Disraeli book sounds interesting.

And hooray for another Susan Choi fan.

You got me with the Disraeli book but my library doesn't have that particular one. They do have a few others about Disraeli though.

>81 Familyhistorian: My favorite book about the whole Disraeli and Gladstone era is The Lion and the Unicorn by Richard Aldous.

When Alice in Wonderland came out Sir John Tenniel drew the Lion and the Unicorn in that book very clearly as caricatures of Disraeli and Gladstone.


I suspect that most readers today - even in the UK - totally miss the reference.

I truly believe that the librarians in the small local library i went to as a kid DID put stuff to catch our interest at eye level in the children's section.

Of course I was so tall I had to bend down to see what they were up to.

>78 magicians_nephew: Wow! People really don't know who Disraeli was? More than other British PMs neither from their lifetime nor Winston Churchill, I mean. (Plenty of folks even in Britain don't care about history.) I read a biography of him some time in my teens, when I was working on reading every interesting biography I could find in the (adults') library. And I'm not even British.

>83 magicians_nephew: This is bittersweet because that is essentially how the bookstores (especially chain bookstores) work.

>84 ArlieS: I didn't. I'm not British myself, but when asked to list some PMs, I would say Churchill, Thatcher, "lord M" from "Victoria" TV series whose name I don't remember, since she was always addressing him as above, and Definitely Not Hugh Grant ;-)
But, back to Disraeli, he sounds like a very interesting person, who also managed to make huge changes! Definitely a persona worth reading about.

With the war on and all I thought it might be interesting to read a book by an author from Ukraine. (I still have to stop myself from writing "The Ukraine" which is what i called the place when i was growing up.)

The one that pops up on the lists was Death and the Penguin by Andrei Kourkov, a Ukrainian author currently living and posting dispatches from Kyiv.

So. Victor (in the novel) is a writer who isn't really writing much of a much. He lives alone in a small apartment in Kyiv.

The zoo a few years back ran out of money (this really happened!) and they offered the animals to anyone in the city who would take one and take care of it. So (Don't ask) Victor adopted the penguin, who now lives with him in his apartment and stares out the window and lives on frozen fish and whatever Victor can scrounge. If there's a Russian equivalent to "A fish out of water". it might be "A penguin in Kyiv".

Then somehow Victor gets a new job writing Obituaries for the local newspaper. There are "File" obits that are researched and written ahead of time and kept until the subject dies, and then they are published. Easy right?

There is some great storytelling in here and the plot just gallops along. The more or less corrupt local government makes an appearance, and the local flavor of the Mafia. Other characters drop in and drop out and keep things bubbling along. To say more would be to spoil it. There's a LOT more.

The book is both funny and sad in a very Russian sort of way, and the characters are both fatalistic and paranoid (also in a Russian sort of way). But interesting and likable

I loved it. There apparently is a sequel, which I want to get my hands on. If you haven't read any recent Ukrainian fiction , you might give this one a try.

“The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.”
-- Anton Chekov

>71 magicians_nephew: Thanks for posting this incredibly beautiful poem!

>86 magicians_nephew: Indeed, that sounds like an original and intriguing story.

(It's hard to break a habit of speaking in a certain way, I should know. The important thing is that you go on trying.)

>85 zuzaer: Lord Melbourne was Victoria's first Prime Minister and she (and her family) liked and trusted him. He was a cosmopolitan and well read man, and charming to talk to. He really didn't do much as PM but he educated Victoria on what a Queens was supposed to do.

When Disraeli came to the Office he had his work cut out for him to make the Queen trust him and work with him. With endless flattery and patience, he succeeded.

The look on the dog's face is just perfect.

And the tail action.

>78 magicians_nephew: England may be getting her first East Asian Prime Minister It's not looking like it at the moment as he's well behind in the polls. But (to be pedantic) there is no Prime Minister of England (or Queen of England for that matter). There is a Prime Minister of the U.K. (Sorry, but it's a sure fire way to wind up any non-English inhabitants of the U.K.)

>92 SandDune: Farther confused pedantry. I thought the Queen was Queen of England, and Scotland, and Wales, and ... as well as Queen of Great Britain, and the various Commonwealth countries. Not that I checked or anything; just foggy memories from growing up in Canada.

>93 ArlieS: She's Queen of the United Kingdom which is legally all one entity. And the United Kingdom is made up of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. And Great Britain is made up of England, Scotland and Wales. (All clear as mud, I hope!) But the only actual official state that she can be Queen of is the United Kingdom. Then she's Queen of Commonwealth countries separately.

>94 SandDune: And Defender of the Faith!

Soon perhaps we'll have a chance to see Charles have a go at Defending the Faith.

Mini Library Thing Meetup in Williamstown MA to see a lovely exhibit of Rodin sculptures and drawings at the good old Clark Art Institute.

ffortsa (Judy)
Magicians_Nephew(jim)
Michigan Trumpet (Marianne)



Judy not thinking about the Thinker



One of my favorites



And this one which was seen as so shocking it was kept behind closed doors when it was exhibited at the Chicago World's fair.

I have been told that in the 1800's museums sometimes had separate viewing days for men and women when exhibiting a work like this.

My most cherished possession as a child was a junk box. Junk box was the parental term for it; if I’d had the vocabulary, I would have called the object my “tomb of treasures” or “vault of valuables.” It was a cardboard cigar box containing rubber bands, a $2 bill, candy, a slab of plastic “prank vomit,” etc. You may have had a similar receptacle when you were young. The instinct to hoard loot starts young.

After learning to read, I jettisoned the junk box for a grander scheme of conquest. Into each of my books I glued a card with the title, author and owner (me), then ordered my brothers to follow library protocol if they wished to borrow a book. Dreading retribution, they complied. And that was my first taste of tyranny.

I no longer operate a fear-based library, but remain tempted to mark my territory with bookplates. A friend recently sent some gorgeous examples that she found in a paper store in Venice. (When I die, please reincarnate me as a Venetian paper store.) The internet brims with collections of plates to enjoy. What do you think — shall we start a trend?
-- Molly Young, NY Times

A beloved teacher of my high school days used bookplates and occasionally loaned me books, which was my first exposure to this lovely custom.(I thought it was super cool at the time.)

There was a company called "Antioch Bookplates" that sold them in little pads, like Post-it notes.

Anyone on here ever got the bookplate habit? I confess I never did. Always wanted to spend money on more books, not bookplates.

Great Photos! What is the one at the top named?

We have used bookplates only rarely when they came as gifts.

I love inscriptions and have posted one from ARCTIC DREAMS on the thread.

>96 magicians_nephew: Cupid and Psyche, the sculpture in the last picture in this post, is not seen here to advantage. Cupid has the most delicious tush, visible from the other side.

>96 magicians_nephew: Rodin made such beautiful sculptures, Jim, thanks for sharing.
I saw an exhibition of his works in Groningen a few years back, also together with fellow LT-ers.

A few months ago our book group took a look at Interior:Chinatown a lovely and thought provoking book about being Chinese in modern America. (And being an actor - but that's another story)

This month we tackled Native Speaker a lovely BIG book about being Korean American in the modern USA.

The book is about a Korean-American man who works as a sort in undercover agent to infiltrate and report on business and political figures. It's his job to blend in, to talk softly, to worm out the secrets and the hidden crimes. He joins the campaign staff of a young Korean American politician, and learns about being part of America, and about being the outsider.

The book is long and detailed about our hero's growing up in America with a father with an engineering degrees back in Korea who ran a Bodega and sold vegetables here and who clawed his way into middle class prosperity. We hear a lot of the father's memories. First generation bears some scars.

There is a lot here about Fathers and Sons, and families and relationships and the writing is very good indeed; terse but at times deeply poetic. Beautifully drawn unforgettable characters.

Looking in from outside looking out from inside. Playing the role being what is expected of you. It ends as a lot of books end -- with shattered illusions and sadness and loss.

Beautiful book, at times meditative and slow and not a heck of a lot of plot. Go read it anyway.

“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
-- Colm Toibin

Being able to listen to Professor Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College talk about American History every week from her Facebook page is one of the best reasons there is for maintaining an Internet Connection.

Her speciality is the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, a time sometimes referred to as "Reconstrustion". It was a time of great changes in America a lot of which are still echoing among us now.

The Book is West From Appomattox and its well worth a read even if you're not that interested in history. She writes about the time after the War with great insight and intelligence.

This was America's "Cowboy" period, when the country really extended from coast to coast. Being a cowboy wasn't glamorous it was a dirty, backbreaking job for next to no money. People went west because there was nothing for them in the east any more. And a heck of a lot of them - perhaps 25 per cent - were Blacks.

Professor Richardson has a lot to say about the economics of the period, where some people thought that the Freedmen in the South needed aid and education, and others thought that the ex-slaves had to be violently suppressed and kept in bondage in all but name. If the Blacks could vote, don't you see, they would just vote themselves money for schools and land paid for out of the pockets of the "Wealthy White folks" . We're still having this discussion.

Richardson calls herself a "political historian" and there's a lot of politics as well as economics in here. As "Deep Throat" always said -- "Follow the Money!". She does. Her telling illuminates an America trying to figure out, after a terrible war, just what kind of country it wanted to be. THAT discussion is still going on, also.

The lady writes with clarity and style and flashes of dry wit. Highly recommended.

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
-- James Baldwin

If you hear "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" and all you think of is Sherlock Holmes, well, sit ye doon laddie.

His historical novels like The White Company are eminently readable and solid erudite (if sometimes florid) fun -- VERY different from the Sherlocks.



But the real fun is in re-discovering The Lost World! (Yeah and you didn't know that the Jurassic Park franchise owed a big debt to Doyle either did you?)

Let me introduce you to Professor George Edward Challenger, the burly bearded bad-tempered "zoologist" who is our hero in The Lost World, a terrific Victorian adventure yarn. He has discovered "The Lost World" in South America, and is proposing an expedition to go and find - wait for it - living dinosaurs!

His sturdy band of explorers set off into a string of hair raising escapades and a terrific conclusion, and a good time is had by all.

Doyle even tries his hand at a little H.G. Wellsian social commentary, with mixed results.

Doyle brought back the characters for a few short story sequels, and one long heartbreaking piece The Land of Mist written after the death of Sir Arthur's beloved wife, that involves Challenger and his team with spiritualism. (Doyle of course was a committed believer in spiritualism, and it's a little embarrassing seeing the hard headed Challenger become a convert. But it's still a pretty good story.)

But the first Challenger book The Lost World is a galloping exciting romp and a heck of a lot of fun. If you haven't read him yet, give it a try.

"The Game's afoot!
--Conan Doyle

More book bullets, Jim. Oh, thanks so much. I've been wondering what to read next. NOT!

As it happens, I have a Pyramid Books edition (35¢ in 1960) of The Lost World that I never ever read. It may disassemble if I try reading it, but what the heck. The White Company? If I can get a copy with Wyeth's illustrations...yes.

And HCR is a daily read on FB for me.

>104 weird_O: Thanks for stopping by, Bill.

They published a 100th anniversary edition of The Lost World a few years back with the original Strand magazine illustrations -- Tom Swift as if drawn by Sir John Tennial!!!!

If you can get your mitts on that one, it's a keeper.

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Wordle in 3 today!!!!!!!

Bowing modestly.

>106 magicians_nephew: - Better avoid my thread. *preens*

>104 weird_O: Bill hearing you talk about your 35 cent copy of The Lost World made me go scanning on my bookshelves for my oldest book.

Found a copy of I, Robot (The Earl and Otto Binder novel Not the later Isaac Asimov collection) in a tattered Ace paperback edition cover priced at 60 cents. Copyright 1965.

Not sure I'd try to actually read it you know but it's fun to hold it in my hands again.

Just a short one. Georges Simenon's "Maigret" detective series are important classics. There are endless books, movies and whatnot about this dour pipe smoking inspector who uses psychology as well as police work to get inside and to "get" his man.

Have to say the Maigret books were always something I admired but did not love. The character seems more a collection of tics than a real person, and the books, especially at the end of the run, seemed too often to be the same story told over and over again.

Our book club took a look at Pietr the Latvian, the first book in the Maigret series. It's fun to see this pencil sketch of the character and know how many adventures yet lie ahead of him. But the story about two twin criminals who lead multiple lives was sort of hard to keep straight and (dare i say it?) sort of hard to give a hoot about.

Glad i read it but it didn't change my mind about the series. Your milage may vary.

"I don't know", said Harriet. "I can only suggest a few methods and precedents. There's the Roger Sherinham method. You prove elaborately and in detail that "A" did the murder, and then you give the story one final shake, twist it round a fresh corner, and find that the real murderer is "B" - the person you suspected first and then lost sight of".

"Or there's the Philo Vance method -- you shake your head and say "there's worse yes to come" and then the murderer kills five more people and that thins the suspects out a bit and you spot who did it"
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

>109 magicians_nephew: I read a few books from that series, in French, back when I was in high school. I mostly read them to improve my French - I wanted something originally written in French, interesting enough that I'd want to put in the effort to keep reading, and written in ordinary French rather than academicese or literary argot.

Hi Jim! I really liked A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, and have always meant to look for more by him.

>110 ArlieS: I totally envy you the ability to read Maigret in the original French.

Curious to know how the original fits to the English-ing.

We had a friend who was tutoring a young Japanese girl in English who was also looking for something to read in English to practice on. I suggested the Nancy Drew books - always wondered if they followed up on it or not

Hi Jim!

I don’t visit as often as I should, but when I do, I go down quite a few rabbit holes – today’s include Alice in Wonderland with original illustrations, Prime Ministers of the U.K., Rodin, and erotic art.

>97 magicians_nephew: My husband bought me an Ex Libris embossing seal (I had to look up exactly what it's called just now) early in our marriage, and I occasionally used it if I loaned a book out, but I truly hated the result. I don't like how it puckers the page, even with the lightest of touches. I’ve still got it. I’ve also got my MiL's around here somewhere.

On the other hand, I love buying used books with inscriptions.

>109 magicians_nephew: I bought the first Maigret because someone here on LT mentioned it, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. You will always get my happy attention when you quote Sayers, especially Harriet Vane.

>113 magicians_nephew: I love that poem. I read it relatively recently, but I don't remember where I saw it.

>113 magicians_nephew: "Mercy" is a powerful poem - do you know which book it is found in?

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My second three. Don't want to know how Katie did on this one

>117 magicians_nephew: - I also got in in 3 :)

>112 magicians_nephew: I've never read any of them in English, so I don't really know.

>112 magicians_nephew: I think Suzanne might have read some of them in French for practice many years ago. Maybe she can share her opinion.

This is going to be a long one, Bear with me.

Henry Kissinger has been out of public life for half a century, just teaching and writing. He just turned 99. But when he showed up at Davos and made a few casual remarks about the Ukraine war, those remarks were reported as major news all over the world. So he's still a player.

His new book Leadership consists of case studies of six important twentieth century leaders and how they -- you know - lead. OK.

He begins with Konrad Adenauer, the man who governed a devastated, divided Germany at the end of the Second World War. His leadership model is one of humility and patience and roll with the punch. Playing a weak hand with incredible dignity and grace, step by step he brought Germany back into the community of Nations and the community of Europe. (Yes, the Marshall plan helped.) It was a remarkable achievement.

(Kissinger brushes aside the fact that Adenauer appointed many ex-Nazis to his official family. Well, yeah. )

From Adenauer he passes to Charles de Gaulle - from "humility" to "audacity" . De Gaulle escaped to England after the fall of France in World War II and presented himself to Churchill as "The Leader of the Free French".
"What Free French?", thought Churchill, but he gave him an office and a staff(And English lessons) . De Gaulle forced himself on Roosevelt (who detested him) and wound up leading the French nation from the humiliation of capitulation to strong fierce sometimes arrogant bristling independence.

(Algeria? Did someone mention Algeria?)

His long chapter on Richard Nixon is perhaps the hardest to read. Of course when Kissinger discusses Nixon he is also ipso facto discussing his (Kissinger's) own strategy and goals. So perhaps he is not the most unbiased reporter. He talks about Nixon's brave opening to Communist China, and his bringing stability to the world with meaningful Arms Limitations Treaties with the Soviet Union. Good stuff and worth remembering. If not for Watergate . . .

But Kissinger takes it as a given that Watergate was nothing more than dirty politics by the Democrats to wound a great president and blow up his careful long range plan for "Pax Americana" and a century of world Peace. It was all the Democrats' fault. If you buy that, you're probably Henry Kissinger.

There is a wistful chapter on Anwar Sadat and the shuttle diplomacy that produced the detente between Egypt and Israel. This far and no farther, alas.

There is a fawning chapter on Margaret Thatcher. (K never loses a chance to remind you of their "personal friendship") Thatcher's outsider status allowed her to see clearly that England's economy had changed, and that England's policies would have to change too. She saw the future clearly, and acted. People got hurt. England was better for it.

My favorite chapter is about Singapore and the economic miracle that Lee Kuan Kew and his family created -- changing a poor city state dismissed by China into an innovative technical and economic powerhouse.

(BUT you have to read very carefully to get it that Lee was a "strongman" who brutally repressed political opposition and held high office for three decades! Ok by me, says Doctor K. )

So what is leadership? Humility, audacity, flexibility, insight, conviction, ruthlessness? Remembering the past, but looking to the future. Kissinger's coldly pragmatic Realpolitik had people gritting their teeth fifty years ago. Don't look for idealism and belief here. Kissinger likes results.

For the historian, a footnote. A lot of this has been covered in Kissinger's earlier books. But worth a read.

“A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
-- Henry Kissinger

>115 kidzdoc: Welcome Darryl and Maryanne and thanks for dropping by.

I found the "Mercy" poem on Facebook and it stuck with me. Would love to read more by the same author. Don't know what book it is in if any.

From The Economist: This physical thing we love called a "Book" is feeling the pinch in England.

Britain | Taking a leaf out of your book
Books are physically changing because of inflation
Rising paper prices are forcing publishers to change

The second world war was a hard time for British publishers. Paper imports collapsed; paper started being made from straw; publishers printed only sure-fire hits. New novels were rejected; a history by Winston Churchill went out of print.

But the war did not stop some books from doing well. A volume by a hitherto little-read author called Adolf Hitler, for example, sold splendidly. Despite being 500-odd pages long and containing chapter titles such as “The Problem of the Trade Unions”, “Mein Kampf” was an instant hit. After topping British bestseller lists in 1939 it became the most frequently borrowed book in British libraries and was, one magazine noted, a “topical bestseller”.

Publishing can, then, find the paper for the things it wants to print, even in times of scarcity. The industry is currently experiencing another period of shortage, and war is once again a cause (along with the pandemic). In the past 12 months the cost of paper used by British book publishers has risen by 70%. Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable. The entire trade is in trouble.

Not every author is affected: a new thriller by Robert Galbraith, better known as J.K. Rowling, is a 1,024-page whopper—and this week reached the top of the bestseller lists in Britain. But other books are having to change a bit. Pick up a new release in a bookshop and if it is from a smaller publisher (for they are more affected by price rises) you may find yourself holding a product that, as wartime books did, bears the mark of its time.

Blow on its pages and they might lift and fall differently: cheaper, lighter paper is being used in some books. Peer closely at its print and you might notice that the letters jostle more closely together: some cost-conscious publishers are starting to shrink the white space between characters. The text might run closer to the edges of pages, too: the margins of publishing are shrinking, in every sense.

Changes of this sort can cause anguish to publishers. A book is not merely words on a page, says Ivan O’Brien, head of The O’Brien Press in Ireland, but should appeal “to every single sense”. The pleasure of a book that feels right in the hand—not too light or too heavy; pages creamy; fonts beetle-black—is something that publishers strive to preserve.

But, says Diana Broccardo, the co-founder of the publisher Swift Press, although some savings might seem small, over an entire year “small things…can add up.” You can squeeze out an awful lot of white space from a seven-volume series of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”. Authors might like to imagine that they are judged by the sheer power of their prose; in truth, publishers must also measure their words by the tonne and by the metre.

Some publishers are considering shorter books. Previously, if an author was commissioned for 70,000 words and filed 80,000, you’d not worry too much, says Mr O’Brien. Now, he says, “You might say, ‘Well actually, no.’…Because otherwise the book is just not going to work.”

This is not necessarily a bad thing. For at the heart of the publishing industry lies an unsayable truth: most people can’t write and most books are very bad. Readers who struggle with a volume often assume that the fault is theirs. Reviewers, who read many more books, know it is not. George Orwell, who worked as a reviewer, considered that fewer than one book in ten was worth reviewing, and that the most honest reaction to most was: “God, what tripe!”

Paper-supply problems provide an opportunity for tripe to be trimmed. In wartime such trimming caused a minor revolution in English literature, says Leo Mellor, a fellow at Cambridge University. Out went dull Dickensian dialogue, in came elliptical modernism. Suddenly, says Mr Mellor, there was “a premium on the laconic and the succinct”.

Book publishers might wince at shortages, then, but book buyers might be relieved. Even bestsellers can disappoint. Reviews of Ms Rowling’s new book were largely positive—though one did wonder why her later books “have to be more than 1,000 pages long” and suggested that it might help “if the wafflier sentences were pruned”. For all its sales, “Mein Kampf” was a bit of a trial: a disgruntled reviewer called Benito Mussolini called it “that boring book which I have never been able to read”. Few readers have ever complained that a book is too short. The reader’s struggle, as well as Hitler’s, could be briefer. ■

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Taking a leaf out of your book"

This made me laugh out loud and think of all my Boston friends

After slogging through the Kissinger book I needed something of a palate cleanser.

So why not back to my reading roots?
(I'm not saying that i learned to read from Comic Books alone, but they certainly were a factor.)

Fantastic Four: Full Circle is a graphic novel by Alex Roth, one of the better comic book creators currently working in the field.


The FF was the super hero group that kicked off The Marvel age of Comics back in the 1960's and its a treat to see Roth strip away all the barnacles and baggage of the last fifty years (FIFTY! YEARS!) and give us this wonderful First Family of Superheros fresh and alive and kicking. The "Hot Headed" Human Torch, the Grumpy but gallant The Thing, the cool headed and maternal Invisible Woman and the Let-me-explain-the-plot-to-you leader, "Mister Fantastic".

Fast moving story, stunning artwork (Roth makes the Torch look really like a guy on fire not just a guy in red long johns) and the sense that the magic that made the FF is good for another fifty years. Looks back to a very famous Lee-Kirby book from the 60's I think Stan and Jack would approve.

Just Imagine!
-Stan Lee

>123 magicians_nephew: I admit to buying books on Kindle instead of the real paper deal when 1) the book is so long and heavy it's going to make my hand hurt or 2) probably not a book that I will re-read or will get a 5 rating. But I still love actual books and I certainly hope they don't go out of style!

>124 magicians_nephew: Having lived in MA 5 separate times, this made me laugh!

>125 magicians_nephew: I just watched the new movie Morbius. I thought is was meh. Glad your book is better!

>126 Berly: Judy's not much of a comic book fan so I watch a lot of these on the sly.
Not sure yet what to make of "She Hulk".

"Fantastic Four" was the rock on which all Marvel comics and movies was built on - its amazing disappointing that that haven't yet been able to make a satisfactory FF movie. (Though the Saturday Morning Animated cartoons of the FF came awfully close) Haven't sampled "Morbius" yet.

Of the making of books about Donald Trump there seems to me no end. But do we have to read them all?

Betrayal is by Jonathan Karl of ABC news, writing about the time between the election and January 6th, and there are some useful insights into the workings of the Trump White House under pressure.

Karl by all accounts is a good journalist and he seems to have unearthed some good sources who told him some good stories.

But you know -- too soon to be history, too late to be journalism. The final word on Donald Trump has not yet been written. When it is this book may be part of it
Until then . . . .

“These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells's history, but history nevertheless.”
–Dashiell Hammett

>128 magicians_nephew: Hell no! We don't have to read any books about that defective reincarnation of Andrew Jackson.

>129 ArlieS: Defective reincarnation of Andrew Jackson

Thats not bad! with a big dollop of Zachery Taylor and a top note of Warren G. Harding.

Been deep diving into a long book - but I'm back.

To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson is a BIG book about the history of socialism and communism in the west, beginning with the collapse of the French Revolution and ending with Lenin's triumphant return to Russia in the middle of the First World War.

Some of these people you know and some are obscure even to historians. Trotsky is here and Lenin and Marx and Engels of course. Lots of fascinating detail of their lives and their struggles. These people lived through a lot and were persecuted brutally, but somehow they carried on.

I guess it's hard in the year 2022 to read a book that makes noble heroes and "Great Men" out of Communists and Socialists. (And the whitewashing of Lenin in this book is indefensible.) But that's where Wilson is coming from. The book is as much as anything a love letter to a passion and a conviction that moved a lot of people in the early part of the 20th century. People wanted their lives to be better than grinding poverty and oppression. To someone living under the ruthless, police state of Czar Alexander II, to be a Communist was to oppose the Tsar. If you were around then, you would probably oppose the Tsar too -- if you were brave enough.

Wilson admitted in later years that his book rather whitewashes Lenin and others, who in their own way were as savage and murderous as any Csarist regime.

But it's useful to look back and see what things looks like to people living then. You learn something. And Wilson is a graceful and engaging writer.

The Past isn't dead. Sometimes it's not even past.
-- William Faulkner

And after that you have to take a break, right?

Death and the Conjuror is the first book of a new series starring semi retired stage magician Joseph Spector. The setting is 1930's England and the author has a lot of fun with penny dreadful theatrical productions and shady actresses and too-smart-for-their-own-good Psychologists. So a lot of the background chatter is fun and entertaining.

And it's a "locked room" mystery, where the murder took place in a room that - apparently - no one could have gotten into or out of. So you might think that our magician would solve the case by revealing some "magic trick" solution.

well - he doesn't. The last chapter when the detective explains everything to his friend the police inspector just goes on and on and on. And the Locked Room really wasn't.

Think the author bit off more than he could chew this time. Disappointing as there is a lot of good stuff here.

But better luck next time. If there is a next time.

read as an Audible audiobook.

>133 magicians_nephew: - Always disappointing when the reveal doesn't live up to the rest of the book...

>121 magicians_nephew: Jim, thanks for yet another great, in-depth review. I have to disagree with Kissinger regarding Nixon. It wasn't the democrats that did him in, he was a neurotic, nasty, manipulative man.

>124 magicians_nephew: hehe

Thanks for stopping by Rachael

l read books to see new sights and meet new people. Re-reading Gertrude Bell Queen of the Desert is a nice way to to do both.

Miss Bell was the daughter of a well to do industrialist born in the late 19th Century, a girl meant for white gloves and "Society". Instead, on an around the world sojourn, she fell totally in love with "Arabia", the rather amorphous desert region then more or less controlled economically by European powers.

On her own she learned Arabic and bought camels and hired men and set out to explore this strange new region. Her love of Arabic poetry and her canny social and political skills had her drinking tea and chatting up many local Sheiks across the region. She learned the protocols. They welcomed her in their tents.

When World War I broke out the region became important and people who knew the people and the issues were scarce. More and more people were saying "Have you spoken with Miss Bell?". Churchill spoke with Miss Bell.

She was deeply involved with the movement to free Iraq from British control and set up an independent kingdom. It was she who drew the "lines on the map" that Churchill demanding to define the boundaries of each Arabic "country". Most of those lines are still there.

She battled sexist pigs everywhere and kept her head (and worked her head off) and made a difference. A remarkable women. This book gives you a chance to get to know her.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

To say that John le Carre writes spy novels is totally missing the point. He writes NOVELS - and great ones.

In the amazing Smiley Trilogy he writes about loyalty and betrayal, love and loss and so many other things. This is not a James Bond novel. It's so so much more.

His most recent masterpiece is A Perfect Spy and while there is a lot of spy "Tradecraft" in this it's not really a "spy" book at all.
.
A spy - Magnus Pym - is in the middle years of a successful career when he suddenly disappears. His superiors - spies like him - are beating the bushes trying to find him. Was he betrayed? Did HE Betray? And the clock ticks.

Pym holes up in a dingy hotel and begins to write a memoir - the lessons and justifications of his life that he wants to pass along to his son. The star of the story is Pym's father Rick, master con man and wheeler dealer and liar and betrayer first class.

(I heard a person speak recently who called Frankenstein a novel about bad parenting. Well "Spy" is like that - the spy in question was raised to believe in nothing and trust nothing and never tell anyone your real truth.)

Query: If a man is a spy and "betrays" the people he is spying on, what is he?
If a man is a spy and betrays the people he is supposed to be spying FOR, what is he then? Hmmmm?

Beware of a man who lives his cover story so deeply and completely that in time he forgets - really - who the man is inside the put-on persona.

We are told this book is largely autobiographical, and that le Carre's father himself was a con man and a crook and an occasional jailbird. So this is very meta, with a man writing a book to explain himself and his father and -- in the book -- a man writing a book to try to explain himself to his son.

Even if you don't like "Spy novels" I think you will like this one. I did. A lot.

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

And after that big and bitter book of betray -- time for a change.

Pulled Right Ho, Jeeves off the back shelves of my Kindle and dived right in.

Laugh out loud funny adventures in ANOTHER kind of insular regimented British society where really nothing really matters after all.

Let's be honest: ALL the Bertie and Jeeves books are the same book. Foolish infatuations with violently mis matched lovers, gorgon aunties, stuffed shirt landowners and the day to day ritual of the silly young ass. Oscar Wilde teased this group in "The Importance of Being Earnest" even as he longed to be part of it.

The genius of Wodehouse I think is that he can make the nitwitted Bertie Wooster the narrator, and see through his eyes the smart competent and dare we say compassionate figure of Jeeves moving effortlessly through the narrative. Bertie is the narrator - - Jeeves is the hero.

Pip Pip!

lol. I've STILL never read a Jeeves book. :)

>137 magicians_nephew: He shoots! He scores! Another book bullet has lodged in my TBR list.

From The New Yorker

this one will be short I think

There used to be a pretty good TV show called "Once Upon a Time" that cleverly and wittily threw together characters from Fairy Tales - Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Peter Pan and others, and dropped them all in a New England town for soap opera romance and galloping magical adventures.

Second Star to the Left is sort of like that. TinkerBelle has lost her powers and is on a quest to recover them and get back to the Land of the Pixies, where she has been sort of banished. She hasn't hooked up with Peter Pan yet.

But she steals from Captain Hook, along the way, and then is forced to team up with him to find a way to repair Tink's "Magic Bracelet" and to gain Hook's revenge against "The Crocodile" who deprived him of his hand.

All this is well and good. But the characters are broadly and sloppily defined, (the author just sort of assumes we know who Hook and Tink are, i guess) and the secondary characters come and go so fast you can't get a grip on them. and while a lot of it is exciting and fun a lot of it is just the same thing over and over again.

There are a number of very hot sex scenes between Hook and Tinkerbelle, just - you know - because they can. And just like on the TV show achieving goal "Z" means having to complete task "B" and secret mission "A" and i promise you you will get just as confused as poor Smee does.

I've had this book on my Kindle for a while now having started it and put it down again a dozen times. So finally I finished it.

So call it FanFic and let it go at that. Not bad but really not as good as it could have been.

You may like it more than I did.

Read as a LT Early Reviewers book.

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.
-- Colossal Cave Adventure

and now for something completely different

Where the Wild Ladies are is a collection of short stories set in Modern Japan telling tales of women (and some men) who find their lives changed by encounters with ghosts and monsters.

Some of the stories are suggested by real old Japanese folk tales, but the author has put a modern frisky feminist slant to them. These are women who work in offices (and put up with Japanese Men) and watch TV and shop at Saks but also burn incense at the family shine and believe in ghosts the way you believe in traffic lights.

Here's a story about a smart and competent but deeply self effacing girl, who never pushes, never tries too hard, never makes anything much of herself, who discovers while climbing a mountain that she can shape-shift and become a fox at will. And as a fox she delights in running and hunting and killing her prey. That would change your life, wouldn't it?

Here's a story about a girl -- a slave to fashion -- who diligently scrapes her body clear of all hair, and despairs when she finds black tendrils on her arms or face. Her auntie (who is a ghost) drops by one day to yell at her and tell her that her power is in her hair and when she removes her hair she removes who she is. And she is changed into a monster who is hair from head to foot and revels in it. Wow.

The world of modern Japan is charmingly described and the writing (and the translation) is graceful and witty and delightful. Lots of little pleasures here. Wonderful and mesmerizing.

Recommended.

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
-- Salmon Rushdie

Heather Cox Richardson is a National Treasure.

Her weekly Facebook chats about American history are always insightful and always interesting.

And her Facebook presence has awakened people to her many wonderful books.

Recently I found myself rereading To Make Men Free her wonderful analysis of the modern Republican Party and how we got here from there..

How the party went from the Party of Lincoln - looking out for the working man and the freed slave - to the party of Industrialists and the wealthy is the story of this excellent book.

There is a real and serious discussion about the role of government here - should government play an active role in helping people to survive, to grow, to be better? Or should government provide only the bare minimum needed for national defense, leaving other issues, like helping people to charity and private institutions?

The first choice is for higher taxes and more government regulation and large sometimes clumsy (sometimes corrupt) bureaucracies.

The second choice is for lower taxes and minimum regulation and allowing "The Hand of the Market" to decide such things.

Some people would say that the second choice was the choice of racism and class warfare and xenophobia, although until QUITE recently these things were not openly discussed in Republican Party circles.

Richardson lets her biases show in this but her facts show through too.

Well organized thoughtful writing. Professor Richardson is a good teacher.

D12 is currently watching Once Upon a Time and loving it!

>146 The_Hibernator: Good to hear! The first two seasons were truly mind bending. Great writing and a great cast!

Thanks for stopping by, Rachel

Amen!

>148 magicians_nephew:. nice!

there is history - there are footnotes to history and there is history "light".

One example of history light is Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire that came out a few years ago and a friend recently recommended to me.

Georgiana lived in the last half of the 18th century, was a Spencer (and Princess Diana's great great (great?) aunt) and had a lot of money and knew a lot of people.

(Honestly this review could really stop there.)

She set the fashion in clothing and deportment, and was a popular figure in the nascent Whig party of the time. She knew Charles Fox, the rakish leader of the Whig party, and was friendly with the Prince Regent who later became George IV.

Of course women did not have the vote then, (neither did a lot of men) but Georgiana campaigned tirelessly among the tradesman and minor merchants who might be persuaded to support the Whig platform of reducing the power of the monarchy and adding to the power of Parliament.

(If you don't know who Charles Fox or Richard Brinsley Sheridan is you're going to need help with this part of the book.)

But most of the book is about Georgiana trying to get a male heir for the Duke (many miscarriages) and her loveless marriage and her gambling addition, and her lovers.

(If you were a woman you couldn't take a lover until AFTER the male heir was produced - then, what you will.)

She knew Marie Antoinette, and wrote letters trying to save her and the King of France after the French Revolution. (Spoiler alert - didn't help much)

So some of it is entertaining and some of it is a bore. Georgiana and her husband had a friend, the penniless Lady "Bess" Foster, who lived with them and became the Duke's mistress and bore him children - more or less openly. Curiously G and Bess stayed friends through all of this.

This book (they made a movie out of it, too) probably got traction due to the Princess Diana connection. ("There were three people in this marriage, and it got a little crowded".) But really girls, The Duchess had minimal effect on British history, no matter how hard this author tries to spin it.

And she died. The end.

Not recommended. I read it so you don't have to.

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Speaking of national treasures.

This week there was a puzzle in the New York Times where the answer was Molly Ivins, the sharp tongued tall talking Texas journalist who took on state and national politics with energy and passion and was funny as hell into the bargain. So i have been re-reading some of her books.

She claimed to have gone to high school with George W. (who she called "Shrub") and was endlessly amazed that anyone would have put "Shrub" Bush in charge of the local Gun Club, never mind the country.

My favorite of her books will always be Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She, and the wonderful You Got to Dance with them what Brung You. Mostly collections of her columns that somehow seem as fresh as the day they were published.

She was taken from us too soon. Drink and the devil did her in, as she always said it would. What she would have said about the current scene can only be imagined. But I promise you it would be gut busting funny - and true as Texas.

Lordie I miss her.

>152 magicians_nephew:. Great Molly Ivins quote!

>148 magicians_nephew: Hurray for small kindnesses!

>152 magicians_nephew: and for saving me the time and trouble. ; )

Thank you as always for books, thank you for this group and thanks for you. Have a lovely day, Jim.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, Jim.

Hi Jim.

>128 magicians_nephew: too soon to be history, too late to be journalism. Well said. I’m pretty much past the point of reading anything else about Trump for a while.

>148 magicians_nephew: 👍

>151 magicians_nephew: Heh. On my shelves. I saw the movie and really liked it, but in the pursuit of more shelf space for more worthy books, I just brought it down from a top shelf and have culled it. Thank you for taking one for the team.

>152 magicians_nephew: Couldn’t agree more.

.
.

Thanks to all who stopped by my little thread this past week.

The death of my sister Linda Carman took us to Florida to mourn and -- alas -- to pick at the scabs of countless past family squabbles that might have just as well been left to rest a while longer.

“Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”
-- Morrie Schwartz

Miss you already, big sister.

This made me laugh

So sorry to read about the loss of your Big Sister.

>158 magicians_nephew: - Sorry for your loss, Jim. Ain't it the truth...

And I join you in the chuckle: >159 magicians_nephew:

Here's one from my childhood, and no it's not a "Narnia" book.


Fred P. Brooks was a programmer and a software engineer before Bill Gates was out of diapers. He was in on the "bet the company" 360/OS project when IBM got the idea to have ONE common operating system for all of the companie's mainframe computers. (Which was a pretty radical idea back then.)

And he wrote The Mythical Man Month one of the all time classics about project management and computer software development.

He was the one who said "Adding more hands to a project that is behind schedule only makes it MORE behind schedule". He was right too.

He pointed out that if the "Man-Month" (the work one man can do in one month) had any concrete meaning, then it followed that nine women could have a baby in one "Woman Month". Got it?

The book is witty and sly and funny and taught a generation of people how to think about this strange new occupation called "Computer Programming" And this strange new thing called "Project Management".

Fred Brooks died this week, a long time IBM fellow and a great teacher. His well thumbed books were on the book shelf in every office i worked in.

Thanks Fred.

Happy Belated Birthday Jim!!!! I am so sorry for the loss of your sister, and of course the family dysfunctional dynamics. I could write a book about my family. Suffice it to say, I have nothing to do with them. I grew weary of the drama. I was the first to obtain advanced degrees, and when my daughter attended a family reunion, she was greeted with the sound of a loud, drunk voice that said "Here comes the snobby part of the family." She got in the car and drove away. It never ends, but I refuse to play their game.

Again, I am saddened that your beloved sister's death resulted in picking scabs.

How are you doing? Did you have a nice birthday?

Please accept my condolences, both for the loss and the nastiness by others. You are Judy are lovely people. I was blessed to meet you and she at two meet ups!

>158 magicians_nephew: I'm really sorry to hear this - both the loss of your sister and the family issues.

>158 magicians_nephew: That is a lovely quote, Jim.

Sorry to hear your sad news, dear fellow. Keep your chin up and remember the good things about your sister and try to put aside whatever is giving you heartache on top of grief right now.

They say that the best way to sell lots of books is to write about dogs, or medicine or Abraham Lincoln.

So Blood on the Moon is a recent update to the vast shelf of books on the Lincoln Assassination.

Picking up on recent scholarship the author has a lot of good stuff to say about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of conspiracy but won a pardon years later, and good detailed stuff about the times when J. Wilkes Booth was on the run in the swamplands of Southern Maryland.

He's very good also about the "cult" of Lincoln that arose around the killing. Different groups of people raised Lincoln to martyr status even saintly status, using his body as a battering ram to get what they wanted politically. Some of this stuff ain't pretty.

And about what the first strange act of terror came to mean to our modern country, now numb to political violence and sudden death.

A good book. A serious book. I enjoyed it. If you are curious about this period and this event, this is a good place to start learning.

Now He Belongs to the Ages"

My book group has been complaining - gently - about some of the books i have suggested. So I thought I'd just send a blazing fast ball right across their collective plates.

True Grit has been made into a movie - twice! - and while the movies have been OK nothing really captures the brisk self-assured quiet voice of Maddie Ross, the narrator.

You know this story - Maddie's father has been killed by rustlers and money stolen and Maddie, at all of age 14 (and a girl!) takes it upon herself to hire a US Marshall with "True Grit" (one "Rooster" Cogburn) and set out into the untamed Indian territories to get her man.

She has adventures and meets hardship and observes terrible violence and suffering but keeps on. She doesn't ask for pity - just for what she wants and what she is paying for.

If Huck Finn had been a girl he might have been something like Maddie - but, you know, Maddie is something quite uniquely herself. She confronts blazing beauty and horrifying death and just goes on.

The book ends suddenly and we are hearing the older Maddie talking and telling and - once again - taking on what her responsibilities are. This is a very American voice and one quite worth getting to know.

If you haven't read it -- HIGHLY Recommended. A classic. I ain't fooling.

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.

Hey Jim! Hope things have been going well! Lol. What kinds of books have you been suggesting for your book club?

A Christmas song from Karen Mason

Two years ago Karen - the Broadway and cabaret legend - put out her wonderful Christmas during COVID song. (By David Friedman) Here's a happier song for this year. (Don't mind the ad)

Merry Christmas to all my good dear friends on LT. And many more. I haven't been among you as much as i wanted to be this year but your words always educate me and warm me

Dear Jim

I am thinking of you and Judy and sending wishes for a warm and wonderful holiday!!!

Thanks Linda for stopping by - and for the good wishes.

Having a good time with an old favorite Robert A Heinlein's Destination: Moon.

This is really two - two - two books in one, as the old time candy commercials used to say.

First is the classic novella "Destination Moon". Written in the glory days of the pulps it's a slam bam story about a group of red-blooded American engineers who risk everything and dare everything to "Beat the Commies to the Moon" with an atomic powered rocket ship in the early days of the Cold War. Heinlein is a master story teller and he keeps the plot galloping along along, even when some of the twists in the plot strain credulity. Just go with it.

Then for dessert Heinlein tells the wonderful true story of making a movie out of it and working with special effects guys and top flight real engineers to make the movie as scientifically accurate as could be, giving the limitation of film making (and the budget) in the day. "Shooting Destination Moon" should be required reading for anyone trying to make a good serious sci-fi movie, even today

Don't know which part of the book I like best but put them together and it's a feast!

We choose to go to the Moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
-- John F Kennedy

>Jim, Heinlein is one of my favorite authors.

And, here is another thinking of you image!

Had a fun double header this week.

First Carol touchstones here as The Price of Salt Patricia Highsmith's little gem of a novel about two women in the button down fifties who meet and fall in love.

It's almost in the style of the pulp novels of the time who showed blousy big bosomed hard bitten miserable women on their garish crude covers. It was a hard and fast rule of the pulps that any "Unnatural" (read "Lesbian") relationship had to either (a) end tragically or (b) end by affirming the wonderfulness of "Normal" again.

Highsmith will have none of that. Her book sort of leaves it up in the air in a lovely and still and - hopeful? - way that must have confused some of the heavy handed readers thumbing through the rack of Ace Doubles in a candy store.

And then for a second course someone recommended to me Flung out of Space a truly glorious graphic novel comic book of Highsmith's early days as a writer, before Strangers on a Train and Hitchcock made her a household name and she was working churning out eight page thriller horror "Romance" stories for one of the more down market comic book companies.

The book is sepia in color scheme and tone, almost like the noir movies of the period. Stan Lee of Marvel Comics makes a brief appearance, and the dime novel scrappiness of the post World War II comic book industry is lovingly re-created.

As is Miss Highsmith. Running back and forth between the two was the treat. Didn't know much about Highsmith's early life - this book filled in a lot of the details.

BOTH highly recommended. And then go read "Strangers on a Train" What are you waiting for?

"While no one is expected to leap tall buildings in a single bound, our aspiring heroes will be tested on their courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, compassion and resourcefulness–the stuff of all true superheroes."
-- Stan Lee

Hi Jim! Hope all is going well with you! Do you celebrate the holidays?

Waaaaay behind here. Sorry to hear about your sister passing and the family squabbles. Dang it. Big hugs. Also here to wish you happy holidays!! Hope you get some reading time in. And thanks for the laugh on >159 magicians_nephew:. ; )

Happy Christmas from my Christmas gnome!

happy holidays!

Malaysia's branch of the 75er's wishes you and yours a happy holiday season, Jim.

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long long ago.

Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor the earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Heavenly Christ

Happy Christmas to all my LT friends, and God Bless us every One!

Jim, The bleak mid-winter is my favorite carol. Christina Rosseti right?

>181 Whisper1: Thanks to everyone who dropped by. Your greeting are a joy.

Yes Christina Rosetti wrote the poem

One for the historian and the scholar today but also one just fun to flip through and enjoy.

In the early 20th century before TV and Radio and in the heyday of 'Vaudeville" there were Big Magic Shows that toured the country, traveling in trains or fleets of trucks, performing evening long programs of entertainment - dancers, singer, acrobats - and cumulating in a big fancy pull out all the stops magic show. They played big towns and small little villages too.


The book is The Golden Age of Magic Posters and it's a big format book with lovingly reproduced posters and handbills and little sketchbook histories of some of the acts. It wasn't just Houdini back hen Interesting Americana but big brassy and fun too.

Belated Solstice greetings. On the darkest coldest day it is good to be reminded that the sun will return. The promise will be kept.

The snowy image is very appropriate for NY. How are you faring after the storm?

Hi Jim!

>158 magicians_nephew: I’m so sorry to hear about the death of your sister Linda.

Alas, it's line in the sand and onward to next year's threads, I'm afraid. One of my new year’s resolutions is to be a better LT friend.

Thanks Karen.

My sisters death is still much in my mind and my heart.

This last few weeks I have been not as good an LT correspondent as i wanted to be. You and my other friends stopping by to keep the thread alive are very much appreciated.

And that, I think is that. As Mighty Mouse might say "Up! UP! and Away!"

Happy New Year to all (i almost typed "Happy Near Year") and all good wishes going forward.