The Man Who Died Twice Richard Osman In the the first installment of  Richard Osman 's  The Thursday Murder Club  we learned about Ron, Ibrahim, and Joyce, three of the four septuagenarians who are members of the club. Elizabeth's past, however, was shrouded in mystery. It was obvious that she had been some sort of spy and had retained her connections with that world. Installment 2,  The Man Who Died Twice  is all about Elizabeth's past catching up with her, in the form of an ex-husband who was also a professional colleague. It becomes obvious that Elizabeth was an MI5 operative or Mi6 operative or most likely both, and that she left a reputation behind her. (For US readers, Mi5 and MI6 are, very very roughly, the UK's FBI and CIA equivalents, by which I mean the agencies that do domestic and foreign spying.) Her ex has stepped in something stinky involving the theft of some diamonds and wants Elizabeth's help is cleaning it off his shoes. (I speak figuratively,...

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell (Translator) I have to admit that often, as I made my way through  The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke , I said to myself, "Rilke is too deep for me." I enjoyed it, but I frequently felt I didn't really get it, or I got it only partially. I suspect this is par for the course with  Rilke . Still, there were those flashes of insight when I felt I understood exactly what he was talking about. For instance, I particularly liked  "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." . This book contains not just  Rilke 's original poems in German, but also English translations by  Stephen Mitchell . In the paperback, German and English are on facing pages, German on the left and English on the right, a useful format for comparing the translation with the original.  Mitchell 's translations are excellent. It is particularly difficult to translate poetry well, even when the translator is himself a tale...

Wyrd Sisters Terry Pratchett Here is how  Terry Pratchett 's  Wyrd Sisters  begins: The Wind Howled. Lightening Stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills. The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’ The three hunched figures are, of course, the Wyrd Sisters. They are Nanny Ogg, Magrat, and our old friend Granny Weatherwax, all witches. I believe  Wyrd Sisters  is the first appearance of Nanny and Magrat in the...

The Blood Orchid Kylie Lee Baker The Blood Orchid  is the sequel to  Kylie Lee Baker 's  The Scarlet Alchemist , and wraps up the  duology . The Scarlet Alchemist  was a rags to riches story. We met Fan Zilan, a poor worker in her family shop, who secretly practiced resurrection alchemy. Zilan studied so that she could go the capital and pass the Imperial examinations. She succeeded and became the Scarlet Alchemist -- the best of all the Imperial alchemists. She ambiguously defeated the evil Empress. Zilan deals in resurrection, so death is not final in her story. The Blood Orchid  is the story of Zilan's quest to consolidate that ambiguous win into something solid. I use the word "quest" intentionally. To a reader of fantasy it felt familiar in form -- the gathering of artefacts,  Rule of Three , the final battle. And it was good. I particularly enjoyed the ending, which was more about subterfuge than swords and sorcery. It was clever and tricky and c...

Trifles Susan Glaspell Susan Glaspell 's  Trifles  is a one-act play first performed in 1916. It is now in the public domain and can be read for free, for instance at  Project Gutenberg . It's a play about men and women. You couldn't write this now. So much of the relationship between men and women has changed. In 1916 women couldn't vote in the USA or Canada. Women were legally and socially lesser than men. Women were silly and emotional, and men were serious thinkers. A man could, for practical purposes, ignore almost anything a woman said. Those things are no longer true. Yet it is still true that men silence women. Although everything has changed, this play feels familiar and relevant. Trifles  is a play of quiet rebellion. It's good. You can read it in a few minutes, and it's worth your time. Trifles  on Project Gutenberg Goodreads review  

Fantastic Four Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (Artist), Ben Saunders (Editor), Jerry Craft (Foreword) When I was a kid (single-digit age, I think), one of the comics I happened across (at random, because I never had the cash to actually buy the things) was an issue of The  Fantastic Four . It interested me strangely for one simple reason: Ben Grimm, AKA the Thing. Before the accident that gave the Four their powers, Ben had been a football star and a decorated fighter pilot. The accident made Ben into a Thing -- a bulgy orange monster who, though strong and tough, looks like nothing human. Ben doesn't see it as a win. He would like nothing better than to become human again, have a face that a girl might love and that doesn't provoke comment on the street. I did not at the time know the word  pathos , but that's what I recognized in Ben. The publisher we now know as Marvel Comics got its start in the heady (for comics publishers) years of the Second World War. After the war, interest ...

We Solve Murders Richard Osman If you go into a bookstore, you are likely to find  Richard Osman 's  We Solve Murders  on the mystery/thriller shelves. I was surprised, therefore, to find when I read it that it felt more like F&SF to me than a mystery. Of course, mystery and Speculative Fiction are not mutually exclusive -- indeed, two F&SF books I read recently,  The Mimicking of Known Successes  and  The Tainted Cup  were mysteries. But those books live on the F&SF shelves of the bookstore.  We Solve Murders , in contrast, has none of the defining elements of F&SF -- no Star-Trek style technobabble, no magic wands. What  We Solve Murders  shares with F&SF, however, is a cavalier attitude towards consensus reality, and willingness, indeed eagerness, to engage in world-building.  Osman  just makes up whatever he wants in order to make his story go where he wants it to. And he has fun with it, and I did, too....

Polostan Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson 's  Polostan  is the story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, AKA Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva. Actually, I should say it is the beginning of Dawn's story, since she is (near as I can work out) only in her early twenties at the end of the book, and it is clear that her eventful story is going to become more eventful in the two subsequent  Bomb Light  books we have been promised. Dawn grows up partly in Montana and partly in Russia. Polostan  is not the usual  Stephenson  brick. Fans like me know  Stephenson  mainly as the author of thick science fiction novels, but also some equally thick historical fiction such as the  Baroque Cycle . At any moment  Stephenson  may digress to a 20-page treatise on orbital mechanics or North American feral hogs or the legal powers of the Dutch monarchy. In  Polostan  he managed to bottle this impulse up. The result is an ordinary length, or even brief, novel...

Sourcery Terry Pratchett,  Colin Morgan (narrator), Peter Serafinowicz (narrator), Bill Nighy (narrator) Sourcery  is the fifth novel in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series, and the third  Rincewind  novel. If I have a complaint about this novel, it is the plot. What about the plot? Well, to be honest, I can't say. I finished the book two days ago, and already I find it difficult to remember the story. Lots of Wizards fighting battles and Rincewind getting caught up in troubles that he is, as always, unequipped to deal with. It does not appear to me that this novel is really meant to be a story. It is more of an infrastructure novel. By that I mean that it lays out more about how the Discworld works and introduces some new characters that  Pratchett  can use in future novels. The story of the novel, such as it is, concerns where the magic of Wizards comes from. (Not Discworld magic in general, but the magic used by Discworld Wizards.)...

The Defenders Douglas Petrie, Marco Ramirez, Marvel, Netflix The Defenders  is the name given by Marvel to its team of four Manhattan discount heroes -- discount relative to The Avengers . But seriously, although "Avengers" sounds badass, "Defenders" is better. Vengeance comes into play only after defense has failed and the folks being avenged are no longer around to be defended. If you're looking for help, you should logically prefer a team called "The Defenders" to one called "The Avengers". There's a reason the USA has a "Secretary of Defense" but no "Secretary of Vengeance."  I watched  The Defenders  (eight episodes) only after watching the four full series Daredevil , Jessica Jones , Luke Cage , and Iron Fist . In fact, this gets the continuity wrong.  The Defenders  is set and was released after season 2 and before season 3 of  Daredevil , and is somewhere in the middle of the other three shows, too. Frequent me...

Spy School Goes Wild Stuart Gibbs As  I wrote previously , this is the  Spy School  formula 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?" In the previous novel,  Spy School Goes North , we picked up a new team member, Svetlana Shumovsky, whom  Gibbs  describes as "the Russian version of Erica", meaning that ...

Iron Fist Scott Buck, Netflix, Marvel Iron Fist is the last and unquestionably least of the four Marvel Netflix TV series featuring various sub-Avenger-level New York heroes: Daredevil , Luke Cage ,  Jessica Jones , and  Iron Fist . It consists of 23 episodes, a first season of 13, like all the other Marvel Netflix series, and a mercifully truncated second series of 10 episodes. Danny Rand/Iron Fist has an origin story so stupid that my IQ drops 20 points when I think about it, so I'm not going to explain him. Danny is always going on about his chi (気) and making mystical hand gestures. He has all the authenticity of a seven-dollar bill. But that's not Danny's biggest problem. Danny's biggest problem is that he is stupid. Now, Matt and Jessica and Luke occasionally do stupid things because of lack of information, or because they're carried away by emotion. Danny needs no excuse. Danny does stupid things because he is a stupid person. He has the strategic intelligen...

Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Ralph Ellison 's  Invisible Man  is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of twentieth century American Literature. I, an American, lived 68 years without reading it. But recently I watched a TV show whose hero carries  Invisible Man  around with him (it was  Luke Cage ) and I decided the time had come to tackle it at last. I have read good books for much worse reasons than this. I am not going to say a lot about it, because so many people who know much more have already written so much. I will say, however, that although it is Great Literature, it is, as a novel, not good. The plot is more a series of events than a story. And there is only one real character -- the unnamed narrator. We get a very good sense of who he is and what he's like, but all the other characters are mere cardboard cutouts serving as background to the narrator's story. Indeed, they are, as the narrator eventually realizes himself to be, invisible. It...

Constituent Service: A Third District Story John Scalzi Constituent Service: A Third District Story  by  John Scalzi  is a bit of fluff. It is not Serious Literature and doesn't pretend to be. It's just a bit of fun to keep you company on your next long drive or constitutional. It's an audible.com original. At the time of writing it was available only in audiobook format, free with audible.com membership, and it's only two and a half hours long, and  Scalzi  is a known quantity, so really, this was a no-brainer for me. And it was Good! Ashley is fresh out of school and takes a job as Community Liaison for The Third District, the City's only majority nonhuman district. The City, never named, is an Earth City, and the story takes place in some future time when, apparently, interstellar commerce is a thing and many aliens live on Earth. The world-building is sketchy, and that's OK, because it's not really the point. It is just an excuse to dream up office colle...

The City in Glass Nghi Vo Nghi Vo 's  The City in Glass , which she describes as "my pandemic book, the thing I wrote while cooped up in my apartment with only my cat for company, and ... just about the hardest thing I’ve ever written." is the story of an angel, a demon, and a city. The demon is Vitrine and the city, Azril, is her city, the city she made. We never learn the angel's name. Vo  is a writer whose work I love, almost despite myself. She is very self-aware as a writer. Gotta tell the truth -- usually that annoys me. Writers who seem consciously to be trying to produce capital-L Literature strike me as pretentious. But I can't argue with  Vo 's results. She is the most versatile producer of varied and creatively told stories I can think of. And her language! Vitrine ... heard the sound of crying below. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing for someone to cry through Summersend, but giving the cat one last scratch, Vitrine wound her way like smoke into the...

From the Wizarding Archive: Curated Writing from the World of Harry Potter J.K. Rowling, Evanna Lynch (Narrator), Hugh Quarshie (Narrator), Finlay Robertson (Narrator), Lara Sawalha (Narrator) Elizabeth Bennett's favorite color was yellow. This fact appears nowhere in  Pride and Prejudice . We know it because  Jane Austen  mentioned it to her friends and family. That Lizzie's favorite color is yellow is not in itself important -- but it *is* important that she had a favorite color. I suspect that most great fiction writers do this: they imagine their characters more deeply than is strictly necessary for the story. And you can feel it when you read; you feel these characters as more real because there is more of them than appears on the page.  J.K. Rowling  did this. She wrote pages and pages and pages of notes of background on the wizarding world and the characters of the  Harry Potter  books.  From the Wizarding Archive (Volume 1): Curated Writin...