All the King's Men Robert Penn Warner I listened to  All The King's Men  sometime in 2014. (Actually, what I know for sure is that I bought it from Audible 2-Feb-2014.) It is, as everyone knows, a classic Pulitzer-prize-winning portrait of politician Willie Stark, who is based on the real-life corrupt Louisiana politician Huey Long. (If you didn't know that, read the publisher's blurb.) To give  Robert Penn Warren  his due,  All The King's Men  is unquestionably what the sainted  Molly Ivins  would call  "Ort" , so don't say you weren't warned. It is also, and this was my first and last impression when I read it, LONG. Now, "long" can be either a good or a bad thing in a book. Sometimes you reach the end of a long book thinking to yourself, "I'm so sorry that's over -- I wish that could go on forever!" These are the best books! For me, personally,  All The King's Men  was the far more common second case, where you re...

Foundryside Robert Jackson Bennett Here are the finalists for the 2023 Best Series Hugo Award: ⬤ Children of Time Series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit) ⬤  The Founders Trilogy , by  Robert Jackson Bennett  (Del Rey) ⬤ The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com) ⬤ October Daye, by Seanan McGuire (DAW) ⬤ Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich (Orion) ⬤ The Scholomance, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey) I was surprised to find, on seeing this list, that I had read five of the six series -- completely, except in the cases of The Locked Tomb, October Daye, and Rivers of London, which have not yet reached their ends. Even in those three cases I have read all extant published novels. The exception was  The Founders Trilogy , which I was previously unaware of. Obviously, the first book,  Foundryside , went on my reading list immediately. I finished it yesterday and added the next two books to my reading list. If that's not a vote of confidence, what is? So what is it ab...

Spy School Goes North Stuart Gibbs In my review of the previous Spy School book ,  Spy School Project X , I wrote Spy School novels  have a formula. We have Ben Ripley, a gifted kid who achieves excellent results by not being stupid, Ben's friends who are well-intentioned and sometimes competent, and the ever-expanding dysfunctional Hale family made up of the World's worst spies, who believe themselves to be the World's best spies, including toothsome teen sisters Erica and Trixie Hale.  Gibbs  picks a setting (frequently this is the site of a vacation or a sight-seeing visit he made), then makes up a silly James Bond-esque plot to play out there, with jokes! The main questions one asks on picking up a new Spy School book are "Where will it happen?" and "How will character relationships change?" I described all that in order to say that  Project X  broke the formula. And it was great! I expressed the hope that "The Spy School novels will never be th...

Immortal Longings Chloe Gong Often I begin a review by looking at the publisher's blurb. I try to avoid spoilers, but my rule is that anything in the publisher's blurb has already been spoiled, and thus is free to mention in a review, without a spoiler tag. And this one! Well, they tell us right at the top that  Immortal Longings  (let me just get this out of the way -- I have no idea what the title " Immortal Longings " has to do with the contents of the book) was "inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra". In paragraphs three and four they introduce the two main characters, Princess Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa. Calla and Anton, do those names sound familiar? Having given away who the main characters are and what their relationship is going to be like, the publishers proceed to reveal the plot. Every year, thousands in the kingdom of Talin will flock to its capital twin cities, San-Er, where the palace hosts a set of games. For those confident eno...

Born to Run Bruce Springsteen I became a fan of  Bruce Springsteen 's music around 1985. I bought the album  Born to Run  by mistake. And I discovered something:  Bruce Springsteen  is a poet. Rock fans, as a general rule, are only vaguely aware that rock songs have lyrics, and don't care what they say. I, however, appreciate musicians like Paul Simon, the Indigo Girls, and Sting, who write poems. To that list I could now add  Springsteen .  Springsteen  began performing at the age of 15, and continues to perform to this day, at 73. I was curious how he became and stayed successful, when so many successful rock musicians burn out. Some of the usual answers apply: he's talented, smart, hard-working, fanatic about his craft, and an excellent word-smith. He's also sober: his father, who suffered from mental illness, drank to excess and it hurt his family --  Springsteen  accordingly was terrified of alcohol and was 23 years old before he fi...

Thornhedge T Kingfisher Thornhedge  by  T. Kingfisher  (AKA  Ursula Vernon ) is an inside-out Sleeping Beauty retelling. The hero of the story is a little fairy called Toadling, so called because she can turn into a toad at will. As the book begins, she is guarding a sleeper in a tower hidden in a forest of thorns. She has been doing this for over two hundred years, and she has deterred many people from the tower. As this statement should make clear, the beginning of the book is not the beginning of Toadling's story. The book begins with the arrival of a sympathetic and friendly knight at the thorn forest. We do eventually learn the whole of Toadling's story. I loved this little story.  Kingfisher  has this to say about how she wrote it Once I had Toadling, the whole thing just flowed... It was really very sweet, and so if someone asked me about Thornhedge, I would probably say that it is a sweet book, and then presumably someone would point out that the he...

Under the Smokestrewn Sky A Deborah Baker We left  the Up and Under  with our heroes escaping the Queen of Swords to enter the land of the of Queen of Wands. Our company now consists of five: Avery, Zib, Niamh the Drowned Girl, the former Crow Girl whose name was reclaimed from the Queen of Swords, therefore now known as Soleil, and Jack Daw. The classic element with which the Queen of Wands and her land are associated is Fire. Fire is the last element Avery and Zib need to traverse before entering the Impossible City. Avery and Zib hope that from the Impossible City they will be able to return to the suburban neighborhood that is their home. As in the previous books of  the Up and Under , the characters are less than totally engaging. Zib is out of action for much of the book. And it is obvious that  A. Deborah Baker / Seanan McGuire  does not love Avery. Most of the other characters are personifications of abstract ideas rather than full-fledged humans, and th...

Don't Want to Be Your Monster Deke Moulton Almost my first thought on beginning to read  Don't Want to Be Your Monster  was, “Is that an allusion to the Blood Libel, or am I imagining it?” I flipped to the back to check if there was an Author’s Note. There was, and no, I was not imagining the reference to Blood Libel.  Deke Moulton  read  Dracula  and was annoyed at some of the downright silly rules that  Stoker  made up for vampires: they need to be invited to enter a home, they cannot withstand a crucifix, … Yeah, it’s all pretty weird and arbitrary — it annoyed me, too, when I read  Dracula . But  Moulton  noticed other things I had not, which led them to believe that the vampire myth had its origins in the Blood Libel. From there they were led to reimagine vampires from the ground up.  Moulton ’s vampires are not Count Dracula, or even Spike and Angel from Buffy — they are much better thought out, and make more sense. They ...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot Sometimes when you reach the end of a book, you think, "Thank God that's over!" Never a good sign. That, I am sorry to say, is how I felt when I reached the end of  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . Although I learned new things and appreciated  Rebecca Skloot 's missionary zeal, I felt that she oversold her case. And this always makes me suspicious -- if you have to exaggerate your case, how strong can it really be? I am a retired biologist, so I know what HeLa cells are. Although I have never used them myself (my work was mostly with invertebrates), I've heard about them forever. As a grad student in the late 70s, I even heard the false story that they were named after a woman called Helen Lane, the story that so outrages  Skloot  and Henrietta Lacks' family. There is no question that Lacks was treated very badly. Among the very least of the shabby treatment to which she was subjected was the use of he...

The Road to Amber Roger Zelazny, Michael Whelan (Illustrator), David G. Grubbs (Editor), Christopher S. Kovacs (Editor), Ann Crimmins (Editor) The Road to Amber  is the final volume of  the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny . This volume covers his final years from 1990 - his death from colorectal cancer in 1995. I'm going to do something a bit different for this review than for the previous five. For those my review and evaluation were based mostly on the stories they contained. But that's not really fair to the  Zelazny  Editor Dream Team of  David G. Grubbs ,  Christopher S. Kovacs , and  Ann Crimmins  (whom I will henceforth call GKC), who put this massive collection together, and  NESFA Press , which published it in six beautifully produced hardback volumes, not to mention  A Pictorial Bibliography , which I will review presently. (NESFA is New England Science Fiction Association.) I can't help but feel that I've been unfair to GKC...

Bridge to Terabithia Katherine Paterson This 40th anniversary edition of  Bridge to Terabithia  begins with a Foreword by  Kate DiCamillo , which she begins with this story: I read Bridge to Terabithia for the first time when I was thirty years old... I recommended Bridge to Terabithia to my best friend’s son, Luke Bailey, when he was nine years old. This was sixteen years ago. Luke finished the book and came out of his room and went into the kitchen and stood in front of his mother. He was sobbing. The front of his shirt was wet. He said, “I will never, ever forgive Aunt Kate.” I won't pretend that this story did not give me pause. I am 67 years old, I love children's books, and I make a practice of snapping up the Newbery medalist and honor books every year. Yet somehow I had never read this classic. But still, knowing that something horrible was going to happen, I looked forward with fear to encountering it. (Let's be fair,  DiCamillo  is not giving away any ...

Learn Japanese with Stories Volume 10 Urashima Tarou John Clay Boutwell, Yumi Boutwell Although the Goodreads page for the series doesn't list it,  Learn Japanese with Stories Volume 10 Urashima Tarou  is book ten in the  Learn Japanese with Stories series  by  John Clay Boutwell  and  Yumi Boutwell . I use these books as a way of slowly learning Japanese vocabulary. Every morning I open  Anki  for a flash card drill. If there are less than five new vocabulary items, I read a page of  Boutwell  and add the new terms to my decks. Since every new term generates two cards, that means, at five new cards a day, I am averaging 2.5 new terms a day. It's slow going, but it's an easily sustainable rate. Installment number 10 of the  Learn Japanese with Stories  collection contains three stories. 三年寝太郎 - The Young Man Who Slept for Three Years はなさかじいさん - Hanasaka Jiisan, the Blossoming Old Man 浦島太郎 - Urashima Tarou These are like tr...

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Michael Lewis In the book  The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine , and even more in the movie made from it,  Michael Lewis  does something that, if not literally impossible, at least on the face of it looks highly improbable -- he writes a nonfiction book about financial markets leading up to the  2007-2008 Financial Crisis  that is as gripping and exciting as the best of fictional thrillers. Even more astounding, he doesn't avoid discussion of the financial derivatives that destroyed financial markets -- instead, he focuses on them. In the early 2000s, the price of housing in the USA rose because it rose -- investors saw that the price was rising and bought buildings for more than they were worth confident that the price would continue to rise and they would be able to sell for much more than they paid. This sort of thing has happened many times in history and is generically called a "financial bubble". We were re...