Crypt of the Moon Spider Nathan Ballingrud I am not a big fan of horror fiction. I think, however, that is because, as a general rule, it is so poorly done. I'm being unfair -- when I say "it is poorly done", what I mean is that it doesn't horrify me. I am not horrified by creepy-crawlies -- in fact, I spent more than 30 years of my life studying worms, so I think worms and bugs are kind of cool, very beautiful little machines, in fact. Blood and guts and gore also don't bother me. What I find really scary is psychological terror -- the fear of losing oneself. Nameless fears -- the "nameless" part is important. As a filmmaker once remarked, if you want to really be scary, never show the audience the monster. Leave it to their imaginations -- the monster they imagine is always scarier than anything you can put on the screen. As soon as you show the monster, as soon as you name the fear, it becomes a concrete problem to be solved, and that will never be as

Leaf by Niggle J.R.R. Tolkien John Rogers  famously wrote There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. For me it, was the one with the orcs. I was still in elementary school when I read  The Lord of the Rings . I was completely blown away by it -- I read it so many times that I almost had it memorized. And after that I read everything I could find by  J.R.R. Tolkien . At that time there wasn't much. Aside from  The Hobbit , which I include as part of  LOTR , there were only two things I could find,  Leaf by Niggle  and  Farmer Giles of Ham .  The Silmarillion  would not be published for many years. There was also eventually a collection called  The Tolkien Reader  that included thes

The Prophet Khalil Gibran ...and this ain't it. The characters of  Herman Wouk 's  Inside, Outside  have opinions about  The Prophet “He’s so mature, so thoughtful, so wise, Izzy, and he gets all his philosophy from this one book.”... “What book, Bobbie?” “The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran,” she said. “It’s so deep, and he reads it aloud so beautifully.” I had never heard of The Prophet or Gibran, but said I would get hold of it. “Oh, do, Izzy. You’ll learn so much. You need that book... Next day I asked Peter Quat about Kahlil Gibran. Oh yes, he said, his doormat mistress had treasured The Prophet, and could reel off whole pages by heart. “What’s it all about?” “It’s utter horsepoop*,” Peter snapped... So I hunted up a copy and read it, and Peter was right on the mark. I first encountered  The Prophet  as a high-school student. We did a unit on poetry, and a few of  Gibran 's effusions were presented as "Prose Poems". I immediately decided it was utter horsepoop. My

Inkspell Cornelia Funke, Brendan Fraser (narrator) I joined audible.com and began listening to audiobooks in 2004. Among the first were  Cornelia Funke 's  Inkworld  trilogy. They were very good -- good books, but also very well read. And since the series is about the magic of reading aloud, this is appropriate. Recently, however, I learned that  Inkworld  is no longer a trilogy. A fourth novel,  Die Farbe der Rache  ( The Color/Ink/Dye of Revenge  -- the German title is a pun that doesn't translate) has recently been published. Wanting to read it, I decided I would first go back and re-listen to the first three books. Inkspell  is, in my opinion, both better than  Inkheart  and not quite as good. It is better in that the  Inkspell  narrator,  Brendan Fraser , is in my opinion more versatile than  Inkheart  narrator  Lynn Redgrave . Don't get me wrong:  Redgrave  is very good -- I would have no criticism of her, had I not heard  Fraser 's narration. On listening to  Ink

A Power Unbound Freya Marske I picked up  Freya Marske 's  Last Binding  trilogy because it was nominated for a Best Series Hugo in 2024. It would not get my vote. I am not a big fan of romance, and am even less a fan of erotica.  A Marvellous Light  contains this acknowledgement And a special shout-out to my mother, who was the first person to tell me that she couldn’t put this book down, and who forgave me for making her read the sexy bits. There are indeed sexy bits in all three novels, and they are explicit and LONG. That was even more true in this, the final novel, because the erotica plays a part in the plot. One of the romantic partners, Alan Ross, is a writer of erotica (although he scorns such euphemism -- he just calls it "pornography"), and the other, Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, is one of his readers. I have nothing against erotica in principle, but it is just not what I'm looking for in my reading. I feel about it much the way I imagine  Marske 's moth

Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) by Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson For me the essential experience of poetry is the “Yes, THAT!” moment, when you read a verse, and you know EXACTLY what it means. A moment was captured, a feeling, a thought. Now, I do not claim that this is the only way to experience poetry, or the right way, or the best way. It is only my way. This works if the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader meet. That makes the experience of poetry very personal. And, I am sorry to say,  Emily Dickinson ’s mind and mine didn’t often meet. It was not a complete loss. For instance, this landed The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth,— The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity. But it was one of perhaps three poems in this collection that did. Even the famous “Because I could not stop for Death” didn’t do much for me. Part of the problem for me was that  Dickinson

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

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

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

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

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

Hazard of Hearts Barbara Cartland I had read only 5% of  Barbara Cartland 's  Hazard of Hearts  when I was moved to speak. Alexa, play " Hit me with your best shot "! You're a real tough cookie With a long history Of breaking little hearts like the one in me That's okay, lets see how you do it Put up your dukes, let's get down to it This is the tough cookie in question, Justin Lord Vulcan He has money, position and women, all the women he wants, including, although I should not mention this to you, that fabulously beautiful bit of muslin, La Flamme. But there have always been women at Vulcan’s heels. It’s rumoured that he treats them badly, but no one knows for sure as most of them are so blindly in love with him that they will not hear a word spoken against the cursed fellow. Here is the owner of the "little heart" in play, Serena Staverley, arrayed for battle She wore a simple gown of white muslin, her arms were bare and there were no jewels or orn

Sargassa Sophie Burnham Approximately 2000 years ago (no one knows for sure how long it's been), Augustus Caesar became the first princeps of Roma. The Empire grew, and Caesarian explorers crossed the Sargasso Sea to discover the continents on the other side. Some of them moved north to Sargassa, where they defeated the Ynglots and established the state of Roma Sargassa. But then 800 years after Augustus, Italia was decimated by plague. A few years later Roma was sacked, leading to a general breakdown of civilization, called The Great Quiet. No one knows how long the Quiet lasted -- historians estimate it was about 300 years. Much of the pre-Quiet historical record was lost. Eventually, Roma was re-established. Five years later Antal Iveroa was appointed the first Imperial Historian. The office of Historian passed from him to his descendants -- in 753 PQ (Post Quietam) Alexander Kleios became Imperial Historian. In 779 PQ Alexander Kleios was assassinated. Thus begins our story. Th