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What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

Spektator said:
From the description it seems that the program adapted three of the books.

Shot in the dark, but does anyone remember an old SF children's novel about some British kids who stow away on a rocket to Mars? I remember only a few details:
1 it is narrated in third person, but the narrator hints that he/she was one of the stowaways - "I was a child amang ye takin' notes;"
2 an adult character is a master mimic, impersonating the voice and appearance of famous people, including Winston Churchill;
3 when the rocket lands on Mars, the professor who invented it realizes they need to test the atmosphere and does it by throwing the hatch open, taking a deep breath, and announcing, "Ah! The purest ozone!"
4 the Martians have devolved into big wrinkly bags of heads with a beak and squirming tentacles;
5 the kids call the leader of the Martian leader "Old Jellybags";
6 much less sure of this, but I think the title included "Red Planet."

This has been bugging me for years.
Click to expand...
Maybe try the r/tipofmytongue subreddit? I asked ChatGPT and it found nothing
 
Tried that, also Facebook and a form for SF fans and writers and stood on stage at DragonCon one year in front of about 1000 fans and asked for any info. About three people said, "I read that! But I don't know the title or author...."
 
Spektator said:
Not the Dickerson "Rocket to Mars," but a review of that one,mentioned John
Keir Cross's "The Angry Planet" (1945), and I think that's it! I've ordered a pricey copy, so we shall see. I'm surprised that it's that old, but then my elementary school never culled the books.
Click to expand...
If you're in a hurry there is Libgen.....
 
Teenage Girls Can Be Demons, Hailey Piper. I enjoyed her novel, A Game in Yellow, so a collection of her short stories seemed like the next thing to do. Normally I try to start at the beginning of an author's body of work, and evolve with them, but this time I just jumped right into her latest anthology, published this year.

As you might expect from the title, the theme of this collection is the struggle of coming of age as a teenage girl in the horror genre. Sometimes the sociopolitical commentary is subtle, other times in your face. I haven't read the entire collection yet, but so far I'm enjoying it very much. The stories are well-written and well-plotted. The characters are engaging. There's lots of food for thought, especially for me. The life of a teenage girl is not something I've ever experienced. It's a good opportunity to develop more empathy and understanding for people whose lives have been deeply different from my own. I'm looking forward to having conversations with my sisters about these themes and their viewpoints.

One thing did stand out to me: The first story is about a teenage girl who is better than the other girls, because she used to be a boy, and in some ways still is.
 
A Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare

This farce may have been Shakespeare’s first staged play in London, before he became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare based the plot on a Roman comedy, The Menaechmi, by Plautus. That one featured a pair of twins, separated not long after birth and as adults unaware of each other’s existence. On a fateful day, one of them, traveling abroad, arrives in the city where the other lives. The traveler is unmarried and a bit wild, the citizen an admired and happily married man. Hilarity ensues as the two are continually confused for each other.

Now, the scholars at the King’s School in Stratford not only read the Plautus play in Latin but performed scenes from it and translated it into English. That was just at the time when Shakespeare would have been attending the school. Perhaps he kept his homework and as a young adult dug it out and expanded it.

Errors certainly seems like a neophyte writer’s work: Shakespeare must have thought, “Okay, if one pair of twins is funny, TWO pairs, hey, make one pair servants to the other pair, and that’s not just funny, that’s freaking hysterical!” He creates two young aristocrats, Antipholus of Syracuse (the traveler) and Antipholus of Ephesus (the married one) and matches each with a servant-twin, Dromio and Dromio. As the play opens, old Egeon, the father of both boys, arrives in search of his three years's lost wandering son, but, alas, the duke tells him that since he set out from home a trade war has broken out, and it’s his sad duty to see to it that the father (who of course doesn’t know that either of his sons is in town) must be executed unless he can pay a huge tariff, excuse me, fine.

Now, Egeon explains at some length in Act I exactly what happened to separate the boys in infancy and how some thirty years earlier a shipwreck broke up the family one baby son and servant drifting off with him, the other pair with their mother. He doesn’t explain why his wife and he gave the same name to each son and each servant. Moreover, when the actors come on state, even the audience can’t be sure which is which. Bawdy gags, cringeworthy puns, baggy-chiton slapstick, and confusion galore, capped off with a whopping deus ex machina and a family reunion. It’s not deep, but it is funny.

Back in my college days, I got to appear in a production of this comedy as Dr. Pinch, a conjuror/schoolmaster/exorcist/charlatan and had a wonderful time stealing every scene he was in. It’s nostalgic to go back and read again this slight but uproarious play.
 
Pandora's Star
by Peter F. Hamilton

typical Space Opera stuff for him, plenty of story arches that are much more interesting than the main story.
Too bad he can't go for more than a dozen pages before an extremely attractive, very young women wants to or does have sex with some much older dude.
 
Mario Puzo's classic 'The Godfather'. It's intensely readable, a jarring reminder of the attitudes of the time and, in my opinion, frequently misunderstood. It's not a novel about Vito or Micheal, rather I think a series of short story/character pieces about the people who moved in Vito Corleoni's orbit tied together in a portmanteau arc story about how the Don passes on power to his youngest son. The massive digressions from the plot to give back stories to every character aren't digressions, they're the point, full portraits or miniatures of all the people in Vito's world, from the Baker and undertaker, even his daughters maid of honour, through his associates, son, and up to Hollywood stars, the fact that the framing story was so good they made a film of it speaks to just how well it's written, but I don't think it's the be all and end of the book.
 
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
by K.J. Parker, aka Tom Holt

I didn't really enjoy The Portable Door or Snow White and the Seven Samurai, but this new stuff is really good. The protagonist is a little bit too good at his trade (siegecraft), but it's good fun to see how things come together.
Going to look into the Corax books next.
 
The Annotated Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, Foreword by Jonathan Lethem, Annotated and Edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto

I’ve read The Big Sleep before, but I’m a sap for annotations. I caught the bug the way a man catches influenza: by exposure. In my case, the exposure came from The Annotated Alice, that tale about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, an alias of a bird named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, rumored to get his thrills by photographing young females in the altogether, and annotated by Martin Gardner, a big number in the math racket. Anyway, a mug like me couldn’t keep his mitts or his eyes off an annotated Raymond Chandler yarn.

Okay, enough of the weak parody. The Big Sleep is an engaging hardboiled mystery novel, the only jarring notes coming from Chandler’s cannibalizing his early short stories for the plot. The seams show. It begins with Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe showing up at the mansion owned by a moribund, wealthy, retired Army man, General Sternwood, because one of the general's daughters is being blackmailed. We meet both of his daughters, the wild and possibly psychotic Carmen and the cool, sarcastic Vivian, whose husband Rusty Regan vanished months earlier. Marlowe soon tracks down the blackmailer, owner of a pornographic bookstore, but the man gets murdered a moment before Marlowe can enter his house. A naked, doped-up Carmen has just been photographed, whoever shot the blackmailer has rushed out of the house, and Marlowe is left to try to make sense of these events plus ensuing murders, plus the whereabouts of old Rusty, and the plot gets very complex.

How about the annotations? I like reading background information, and the annotators’ excerpts from the original short stories show how Chandler expanded on his originals to create his first novels. The details are interesting and intriguing, as are the arguments pro and con over the question of whether the novel is an example of noir or not. On the other hand, I think there’s a bit too much discussion of such things as the various terms Chandler uses for handguns (gat, rod, piece, heater, etc.) or a woman (frail, broad, chippy, dame, etc.) or money (dough, do-re-mi, jack, mazuma, you get the idea). Granted, many of the slang terms are outdated, but Chandler provides enough context for the average modern reader to grasp the meaning.

Summing up, I enjoyed reading the book (again) and found a good many of the annotations infteresting, while others were just extraneous. And with that I’ll pack my roscoe and dust (make tracks, scram, be missing, take it on the lam).
 
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Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.
John G. Turner, Yale Univ. Press, 2025.

Turner's a professor of religious studies and history at George Mason
Uni, so he's qualified for this.

I'm at p. 233, after the great war in Missouri and JoJo's connived-at escape
from the charming citizens of that state. Jesus's middle name, what a
barbarous place and time!

Much detail, lots of obscure names, everything marshalled firmly so you
can learn it -- but, so far, no revelations for anyone who's read Fawn Brodie.
From the outset, Turner says that he sees Smiff as a bit of prophet and scoundrel
both. Fine, he's being honest. But

• How can he be a prophet of anything?
• What's left of him to offset the scoundrelism?

Oh well, 233pp is only half the book, and it's a good read. I only wish Yale
hadn't used the same dust jacket pic as Brodie's edition: that flattering portrait
of Smith. I have to lay the book face down when I'm not reading. I can't
endure that con artist's smirk.
 
Currently reading Our Wives Under the Sea. A melancholic story about the protagonist's relationship with her wife after the latter returns traumatized from a submarine mission that went terribly wrong. Not much of a plot per se, more of a book about their home life day to day, but that's fine, it's well-written.

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The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

I’m on a current kick of re-reading books I taught years ago in a course about the history of children’s literature. This novel, published in 1911, is in my opinion her best. It centers, mostly, on Mary Lennox, who lived with her parents in India during the British Raj. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the word about a cholera outbreak in time to flee to the high country, and both her father and mother die. After a short time, British soldiers find the girl, the sole survivor. A clergyman and his wife temporarily take her under their wings, but before long she finds herself shipped off to England (where she’s never been) and whisked by carriage to Misselthwaite Manor, owned by Mary’s sister Lilias and her husband, Archibald Craven. Sadly, we learn that her aunt Lilias (Lily in the musical) has also died some time back.

What sweeps me right into the novel is how independent, grouchy, and unpleasant Mary is at the get-go. She’s used to being obeyed instantly by Indian servants, she deeply resents the clergyman’s children teasing her and calling her contrary, and she does not take kindly to the brusque manners of Miss Medlock, her uncle’s housekeeper. And after the balmy world she has known in India, the cold, clammy moors of Yorkshire are dismal.

Gradually, very gradually, Mary meets people who are not as gruff as she is, and one who is. Martha Sowerby, scarcely older than Mary, is assigned to be her maid, but she takes all of Mary’s grumbling with unfailing good humor. Martha insists that the moors are lovely if one understands them, as her younger brother Dickon does. Eventually, Mary runs into old Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener, who takes a liking to her precisely because he’s just as sour as she is. Then comes Dickon, an almost faunlike young fellow, and, after her unsuspected cousin Colin’s wails echo through the halls, she meets him, an ill-tempered invalid who rarely ever even sees his father, for Craven has all but fled his own house following his wife’s death. As Mary ventures outside, she discovers a walled garden . . . with no gate . . ..

The wonderful thing about the novel is how Mary’s personality unfolds, just like a bud finding a flower within itself. Somehow without losing her edge (she challenges the hypochondriac Colin to a wailing contest), she becomes a positive force in the other characters’ lives, and she redeems more than just a long-forgotten and wasted garden.

For me, the flaw, and it’s a sad one, is that in the final scene Mary does not get to share in an epic moment.

I miss the girl, aye, that I do. However, even so it’s a fine novel.
 
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Henry IV, Part 1, William Shakespeare

Traditionally, Shakespeare’s plays are divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories. Of the latter category, this one is my favorite. One reason is that it combines genuine (though condensed) British history with a young man’s tragic fate and with moments of high comedy. A threefer!

The play covers the time period between the Battle of Holmedon (today Humbleton Hill) in 1402 and the Battle of Shrewsbury in the summer of 1403. The reigning monarch, Henry IV (formerly Henry Bolingbroke), has an uneasy hold on the throne owing to his having forced the abdication of his predecessor, Richard II. Henry is of the House of Lancaster, Richard was of the House of York, and thus the seeds of the red and white roses were planted for the ensuing internecine war. Henry and his court are one of the three groups whose activities the play covers; against him are the proto-Yorkist faction led by Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, his brother Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Henry’s son Henry, usually called Hotspur. A Welsh firebrand and mystic, Owen Glendower, joins them as do the Scot Earl Douglas and Edmund Mortimer, whom the former king Richard had named heir to the throne, except Henry IV stole it from him.

And the third group is Prince Henry (there had been a serious drought in England, leading to a shortage of first names), a wastrel and lawbreaker and naughty young man, who cavorts with a bunch of disreputable thieves and drunkards, primarily the elderly, fat Sir John Falstaff. Though threescore years old, Falstaff is a trickster and roisterer who can outdrink the rest of them. He takes nothing seriously, least of all himself.

Although details like the exact time period, the politics of the era, and even the identities of the characters are fuzzy, that doesn’t matter. In reality, Prince Hal was a good bit younger than the play’s version; Falstaff is not a historical character at all, though he’s remotely based on a real person, Sir John Oldcastle; and Shakespear gets the wrong Mortimer. None of that amounts to much. The interpersonal relationships, family, friendly, or inimical, the character growth, and the humor win the day and make this a really enjoyable play.
 
Currently reading a swedish history book about The Hanseatic League by swedish history professor Dick Harrison. Its a thick brick filled with details about the rise and fall of the Hansa trading imperium. I'm about 1/3 in and it will take a couple of more weeks to finish it. Very interesting stuff!

After that, I will continue Knausgårds Morningstar series with book #5 Arendal.
 
Call for the Dead, John le Carré

This is le Carré’s first novel to feature George Smiley, they tubby, poky spymaster who hides a shrewd tactical mind behind his spectacles and mild eyes. More a detective novel than a spy thriller, this sees Smiley visiting the home of a minor Foreign Office functionary to discover why the man—the enigmatic Samuel Arthur Fenman—committed suicide the night after Smiley had questioned and cleared him as a security risk. Fenman had seemed satisfied with Smiley’s assurance that the interview had ended well for him, yet he had left a farewell note for his wife and had evidently shot himself.

Mrs. Fenman, visibly shaken but fighting to remain calm, tells Smiley that her husband’s reaction to the interrogation was far different from what Smiley expected. The man was on edge, visibly despairing, convinced that his whole world would come crashing down. While Smiley is meeting with the widow, the phone rings. It turns out to be a reminder call that Fenman had asked for. Yet at the time he had requested the reminder call, he must have been dead. The stubborn Smiley sets out to learn what it’s all about.

We follow his patient investigation as be becomes more and more convinced that Fenman's death was murder, not suicide. As the case unwinds, we meet characters who will later become familiar: Smiley’s protégé, Peter Guillam, the soon-to-be retired and unofficiial consultant Inspector Mendel, the elusive enemy Hans-Dieter Mundt (who will reappear in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold). And, oh, yes, Lady Ann, Smiley’s serially unfaithful wife, who in this novel deserts her husband for the first time, distracting his attention from the case in hand.

Terser and not as complex as the later Smiley novels, this is a nice introduction. Be aware, though, that le Carré later retconned the biography of Smiley as we get it here to make him younger, though no less podgy. Recommended.
 
Edward II, Christopher Marlowe

The full title of this pioneering English history play is The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer. It is something of a landmark in British drama, pointing the way to a type of play that Shakespeare would later bring into sharper focus.

Marlowe collapses the twenty-year reign of King Edward II (ruled 1307-1327) into a fast-paced and densely populated series of scenes, with occasions of exciting action completely omitted and only referred to. The tensions arise early as Edward II brings his favorite (and lover), Piers Gaveston, into the court, granting him a variety of titles and doting on him to the dismay of Edward’s wife, Isabella. Marlowe treats the homosexual relationship objectively, though the does show that it created a serious breach among Edward's supporters. As the king’s barons start to fear that under Edward's indulgent aegis the lowly-born Gaveston stands ready to usurp their lands and titles, political unrest grows. Gaveston is exiled to Ireland, then reprieved, then banished again, then returns again, secretly, and finally is assassinated.

By that time the furious king has launched a war against those noblemen who opposed his friendship with Gaveston, the conflict teeters back and forth, Edward is taken prisoner, and we witness his ignominious end and the rise of his unprepared young son to the throne as Edward III. The play is written in fairly unadorned blank verse, and it’s easy to follow but harder to understand. The rapid shifts of time had me referring to an online biography to keep track. In one scene, the King complains that Isabella and a contingent of rebels have launched from France to invade England; in the next, the characters are saying, “What an epic battle that was!” and enumerate the living and the dead and the wounded before the next leap of a year or more in the ensuing scene.

For many decades performances of the play rarely saw the stage, partly because of the same-sex relationship of Edward and Gaveston, which could be editorially muted but not completely cut from the script. Then, too, the style of the play is old-fashioned and declamatory, characters coming on stage to deliver speeches, with little give-and-take conversation. Shakespeare pretty clearly took hints from Marlowe’s works. His Richard II centers on a similar doomed king and parallels the development of events, though with much more character development and stage action. I can’t say I enjoyed this reading (my first) of the play all that much but I found it instructive.
 
Drink Your Way Sober: Science Based Method to Free Yourself from Alcohol by Katie Herzog.

Short version, there's a drug called naltrexone that when used in a particular way has a 75-80% success rate at getting people to stop drinking.
 
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