★★★☆☆ Meh...

Sword of Honor Trilogy

Evelyn Waugh

I read these novels eleven years ago (06-Aug-2011). I barely remember them now. What I do remember is a sense of disappointment. Having heard Evelyn Waugh's name forever, and having heard him praised as one of the most humorous English authors, I was expecting more. It was fun, not a waste of time to read, But it was only a little fun. I see other reviewers compare him to PG Wodehouse. Not even close, in my opinion!

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★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sent here to die. Eddie and Jane vowed

★★★★★ A good guy

The Sojourner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. 1 CHRONICLES 29:15 When I was an undergraduate, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ' The Yearling . It was so good that I immediately grabbed everything by Rawlings in the Cornell Undergraduate Library. Unfortunately, that was easy, because Rawlings didn't publish a lot. Besides The Yearling (easily her most famous work), South Moon Under , a story collection When the Whippoorwill , a memoir Cross Creek , and this novel, The Sojourner , which became my favorite. It's the life story of a man Asahel Linden. Ase is a farmer somewhere in the USA. (I don't remember where, but I have a vague impression of one of the southeastern states.) And the simple thing to know about Ase is that he's a good person. He is overshadowed by his brother Ben, whom his mother loves and considers his clear

★★★★★ Hot stuff!

Spice: The History of a Temptation Jack Turner Columbus, when he set out on his journey west, was hoping to find, among other things, spices. At that time there were two routes by which spices could be brought from India and the Spice Islands to Europe: the older land route and the sea route around Africa pioneered by the Portuguese. In his Introduction to Spice: The History of a Temptation , Jack Turner writes The Asian empires of Portugal, England and the Netherlands might be said with only a little exaggeration to have sprouted from a quest for cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmeg and mace, and something similar was true of the Americas. Spice is a book in a nonfiction genre I call "History of Substances", which I find absolutely fascinating when well done. My three favorite examples are A Perfect Red , by Amy Butler Greenfield , which is about the red dye cochineal, The True History of Chocolate , by Sophie D. Coe , and this work. Unsurprisingly two of the three con

★★★☆☆ Picaresque with Hooloovoos

Ghostdrift Suzanne Palmer This review will be unfair to Suzanne Palmer 's Ghostdrift , and that is my fault. I wasn't paying attention when I requested it and thus failed to notice that it is the fourth and last book of the Finder Chronicles , none of which I had previously read. How big an issue is it to jump into a series in the middle, or even at the end? Usually people asked that question respond by discussing the plot. But of all the jump-in issues, the plot is the least important. More important are characters and, for speculative fiction, world-building. By the time you have finished three novels about Fergus Ferguson, the central character of the Finder Chronicles , you probably know him fairly well, and with any luck you like him and are happy to spend more time in his company. Furthermore, you know a great deal about the science-fictional galaxy he inhabits. Those were advantages I lacked. I didn't feel that I lost a great deal by not having known Fergus. Ferg

★★★★★ My Ántonia and the Titan

My Ántonia Willa Cather There are a very few books that impressed me so much on my first read that I can remember exactly where I was. Perhaps the strongest of these experiences was my first reading of Willa Cather 's My Antonia . I had just gotten it out of the Cornell Undergraduate Library and sat down in my room to read it. At the same time I put a new album my parents had given me on my turntable -- Gustav Mahler's Symphony #1 "Titan". I don't usually listen to music while I read -- I have not so capacious a mind as to be able to encompass two distinct works of art at the same time. But somehow, this time it worked. Despite its title "Langsam, schleppend, Immer sehr gemächlich" "slow, dragging, always very restrained", the first movement of Mahler's Titan symphony begins lively and cheerful. As I read about Jim and Ántonia playing together on the prairie it felt as if the music had been written for them. Titan remains one of my all-ti

★★★★☆ Matrimonial predators

The Brides of High Hill Nghi Vo We catch up with Chih, who is accompanying the Pham family -- Mr and Mrs Pham and their daughter Pham Nhung to the castle of Lord Guo. The Phams are a family of merchants down on their luck, and Nhung has been proposed in marriage to Lord Guo. She and Chih met cute, and she asked them to accompany her to Lord Guo's castle for the marriage negotiation. Chih appears to have a mini-crush on Nhung, which she appears to encourage. Chih desperately misses their neixin Almost Brilliant, who is mysteriously absent. Nhung is naturally worried about being married. Chih, who knows many stories, true and fictional, about husbands and wives, would like to reassure her, but cannot honestly do so. Stuff happens. You will recognize the story pretty quickly. It's Bluebeard. You probably already figured that out -- the plural "Brides" in the title kind of gives it away. In this one Chih faces serious personal danger, more immediate than in any other S

★★★☆☆ If you cross historical fiction with biography

The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt Jeff Shaara A book recounting the life of Theodore Roosevelt could be one of (at least) two things: a biography (including in that category autobiography -- these exist ) or a novel. The subtitle of The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt makes it clear which of these author Jeff Shaara was aiming for. And his "To the reader" note explains that choice The best way to describe this book is perhaps to describe what it is not. This is not a biography (and there are many), nor is it an academic examination of the man or his political policies (and there are many of those). Consider that the definitive biography of the man, by Edmund Morris, covers three volumes and totals more than 2,400 pages. Morris’s admirable work is essential to anyone seeking the most minute details of Roosevelt’s life. I did not have the means to expand this story into three volumes, nor would I wish to. What I have tried to do is create a story, with

★★★☆☆ Moon gods, metaphysics, and sneers

Tidal Creatures Seanan McGuire Tidal Creatures is the third novel in Seanan McGuire 's Alchemical Journeys series, or the seventh if you include the Up and Under books. The unifying principle behind the series is the personification of things that are not persons, objectively or scientifically speaking, such as the Doctrine of Ethos ( Middlegame ), Winter and Summer ( Seasonal Fears ), and now the Moon. Five of the main characters are Moon goddesses (Aske, Change'e, Artemis, Diana) and a Moon god (Máni). We also meet Kelpie, who is not in fact a Kelpie, but a personification of Artemis's Hind. Each of the gods/goddesses is in fact two persons -- a god/dess and an ordinary human whose body the two share. McGuire explains the relationship at length. Roger Zelazny began his career by writing about thirty stories, which he sent to all the Science Fiction magazines, for which purpose he had made a comprehensive list. In this way he collected 150 rejections and no accept

★★★★☆ This thing sort of looks like a Velveteen novel...

Velveteen vs the Multiverse Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse is the second book of Seanan McGuire 's Velveteen vs series. Nowadays (25-Sep-2022) these books are only dubiously available as books. The first two, Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots and Velveteen vs. The Multiverse are available as audiobooks from Audible, which counts. I have not been able to find Velveteen vs. The Seasons or Velveteen vs. Everything for sale anywhere in any form. Velveteen vs. The Seasons apparently was a real book at some point, published in hardcover by ISFiC Press in 2016, just before, apparently, they went belly-up. Audible doesn't have an audiobook of it. Although Amazon lists Velveteen vs. The Seasons , no copies are available for sale. Velveteen vs. Everything has, I believe, never been a book, -- it is just an umbrella title for all the Velveteen stories together. The good news, however, is that "The stories remain free to read online", as McGui

★★★★★ Twenty-five years of recreational mathematics

Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions Martin Gardner In 1967 my Aunt Althea, the very best of all possible aunts, gave me a subscription to Scientific American for my twelfth birthday. I remined a subscriber until the 1990s. Among the best features of SA were the monthly columns "The Amateur Scientist", where you could learn how to build a laser in your garage -- you think I'm joking, but I'm serious -- and Martin Gardner 's Recreational Mathematics column "Mathematical Games". Yes, I know that to many of you the phrase "recreational mathematics" makes about as much sense as "recreational colonoscopy", but there are enough people who were willing to entertain the idea that math could be fun to sustain Gardner 's column for 26 years. I was one, and Gardner was brilliant. These columns were collected and published in fifteen books by SA . The best way to get them now is in electronic form. There is a searchable CD

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