Claudius the God Robert Graves Robert Graves 's  I, Claudius  introduced Claudius, the man who would become Rome's fourth emperor. He was underestimated because of his lameness and his stutter, called "Claudius the Idiot" by his family and associates, as well as other unsavory names. Claudius, as presented by  Graves  in that fictional autobiography, is an appealing figure. He is intelligent, humble, and (by the admittedly low standards of the time) humane. He genuinely wants to restore the Roman Republic.  I, Claudius  ends with Claudius being elevated to Emperor. He is genuinely unhappy about this, but accedes to prevent bloodshed and disaster. In  Claudius the God  he finds, tragically, that Empire is a trap he cannot escape. It is never possible to set aside the burden without causing even greater disaster. Worse, it is impossible to remain humane and remain Emperor. He gradually becomes ever worse. In  I, Claudius  he, a 51-year-old...

The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club Bertrand R. Brinley If you have read  Bertrand R. Brinley 's  The Mad Scientists' Club ,  The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club  will be familiar. It contains five more stories about the Mad Scientists' Club, to wit, The Telltale Transmitter The Cool Cavern Big Chief Rainmaker The Flying Sorcerer The Great Confrontation These vary in quality, but on the average they are not, in my opinion, as good as those in the first book. I enjoyed the first, "The Telltale Transmitter" quite a lot, but the rest seemed to be straining too hard to be zany and quirky, to the extent of occasionally betraying the boys' characters. The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club  on Amazon Goodreads review  

The Bedlam Stacks Natasha Pulley I think I have figured out what it is that  Natasha Pulley  does so well in her  Watchmaker of Filigree Street  books: she erases borders. The most obvious of these is the border between fantasy and reality. I have loved magic realism since I read  One Hundred Years of Solitude , around 1984. (I remember borrowing it from the MIT library, because the librarian asked me, "You don't want to read  Cien Años de Soledad ?" as if that were totally incomprehensible. I had to explain to him that I couldn't read Spanish. Years later I also remember the Spanish teacher at Berlitz laughing at me when I said I wanted to learn Spanish so I could read  Cien Años de Soledad . In fact, I did eventually do it.) It was like nothing I had ever read -- the way the magic seeped into the real lives of the Buendía.  La casa de los espíritus  was even better. The  Watchmaker of Filigree Street  books are like that, but more...

Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett The Discworld yields a full-fledged novel Guards! Guards!  is the eighth book in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series. It is, however, the first one that feels like an honest-to-God novel. For instance, the audiobook is 13 hours and 29 min long, a respectable length for a novel. Previous  Discworld  books are about eight hours long. It appears that  Pratchett  needed to work up to  Guards , since the previous two books are a bit longer:  Wyrd Sisters  and  Pyramids  at 9:53 each. And the effort seems to have left him exhausted, since book 9,  Eric  weighs in at a mere 3:58. I'm joking, of course. I don't know what order the  Discworld  books were written in. But it is a fact that  Guards  is the longest of the first twelve, by a considerable margin. What's more,  Guards  feels more like a novel than the previous  Discworld  books. Your typi...

A Spindle Splintered Alix E. Harrow ...than sleeping for a hundred years. In fact, in the  Grimm's Fairy Tale   Little Briar Rose , which turned into what we now call "Sleeping Beauty", it was to avoid the most obvious of these, death, that Rose was cast into her enchanted sleep. In  Alix E. Harrow 's  A Spindle Splintered  our hero suffers from a different one, "fatal teratogenic damage caused by corporate malfeasance", although that is really just a longer and more specific version of "death". This was not a curse placed on her by a scorned wise woman -- as she notes, "Wicked fairies are thin on the ground in rural Ohio." But, sadly, good fairies are no more common there than wicked ones. No one with GRM (Generalized Roseville Malady) has survived past the age of twenty-one, and the story starts on Zinnia's twenty-first birthday. Zinnia doesn't expect to fall into a hundred years sleep, but any day now she will die. She has, how...

Siren Queen Nghi Vo If you read a lot, you may have a "Take my money!" list. It lists the authors whose work you will buy, whenever and however it appears. I have a list like that, and  Nghi Vo  is on it. She understands the magic of stories and the magic of words and knows, as well as any author I can name, how to cast a spell. I haven't quite read everything that  Vo  has published, but I'm working on it. Siren Queen  was the first novel she ever wrote. It is not the first novel she published. That was  The Chosen and the Beautiful , a darkly magical retelling of  The Great Gatsby , and in  my opinion  an improvement on the original. To me,  Siren Queen  feels a lot like  The Chosen and the Beautiful . Both are stories of queer young women from the Asian diaspora in a familiar setting made unfamiliar by dark and dangerous magic. In  Siren Queen  the young woman in question is Chinese-American Luli Wei, and the setti...

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Natasha Pulley In  The Once and Future King   T.H. White  introduced his version of Merlin. In all versions of Arthurian legend that I know, Merlin is a wizard and can do magic. But  White 's Merlin was special in another way: he lived backward. He could remember his own future, but the past he could only vaguely foresee, the way that you foresee the future. As a result Merlin could tell Arthur his future, and could tell him how he must act to make that future happen. Keita Mori,  the Watchmaker of Filigree Street , is something altogether more complicated and interesting than  White 's Merlin, but yet there is a kinship in how they live. To avoid spoiling, I will not be more specific. The story revolves around Mori. (That's 毛利 in his native Japanese, pronounced Mōri, probably derived from 森, Mori, forest, a common Japanese surname.) Besides his strange relationship with time, Mori is a maker of extraordinarily complicated ...

Strega Nona Tomie dePaola I read  Tomie dePaola 's  Strega Nona  because of  this Washington Post  article, in which my sister is mentioned. It's a Caldicott Medal winner, so I grabbed it. Honestly, it escapes me. The story is a fairly generic Sorcerer's Apprentice tale. (In fact,  Wikipedia  identifies it as "Aarne-Thompson type 565, the Magic Mill.") Of course, the Caldicott Medal is given for illustration. Although the illustrations were not bad, they appear to me to be nothing particularly special. Strega Nona  on Amazon Goodreads review  

The Mad Scientists' Club Bertrand R. Brinley I think I was 13 or 14 years old when I first read  Bertrand R. Brinley 's  The Mad Scientists' Club . It quickly became one of my favorite books, and I reread it many times. (It helps that it's short.) It's in the tradition of books of stories about mischief-making boys, like  Stalky & Co . These particular boys call themselves The Mad Scientists' Club, and the mischief they get up to usually involves high-tech (1960's incarnations) tricks like radio-controlled motors, etc. It's all very wholesome -- there aren't even any fart jokes (or if there are, I don't remember). The most risqué we get is loud burping. And the stories are actually good. Each of the boys has a definite and distinct personality, and they do sometimes worthwhile and always fun things. But, yeah, it's about boys. The only girl is one Daphne Muldoon, who is the sweetheart of one of the boys. (Gay relationships, you ask? In 19...

Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan Michael G. Waltz I picked up  Michael G. Waltz 's  Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan  because President-Elect  Donald Trump  nominated him for National Security Advisor. I saw that he had written this book and read it to get an idea of who he is. First lesson:  Waltz  is not a buffoon like Matt Gaetz or Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Not a buffoon" is a low bar, but with this administration a nominee who clears it is welcome. In fact, I would go so far as to say that  Waltz  is an intelligent man with serious experience relevant to the post of National Security. If you are more than 30 years old, you have probably had this experience. You know a couple -- perhaps one of them is a friend of yours. Their relationship is always on the rocks. They fight, and the fights are serious. Because you're outside the relationship, you can see what neither...

I, Claudius Robert Graves Robert Graves 's  I, Claudius  begins with these words I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus this-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as ‘Claudius the Idiot’, or ‘That Claudius’, or ‘Claudius the Stammerer’, or ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’, or at best as ‘Poor Uncle Claudius’, am now about to write this strange history of my life... It is ostensibly an autobiography written by Claudius himself, covering the years of his life until he suddenly and unexpectedly became Emperor of Rome. (The sequel,  Claudius the God  continues the story into his reign.) Claudius is an intelligent and, given his environment and predecessors, surprisingly decent and humble man. Of course, the reader never forgets that we have only Claudius's own word for who and what he is. But his intelligence is beyond doubt -- a fool could not have writ...

Pyramids Terry Pratchett Yesterday I finished listening to  Terry Pratchett 's  Pyramids  (book 7 in his  Discworld  series, and I find myself doing what I usually do when I finish a  Discworld  novel: scrambling frantically to locate the plot. It's not that  Pyramids  lacks a plot. My problem is  Pratchett 's everything-up-to-and-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to story-telling. The plot of  Pyramids  is surrounded my yards and yards of stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. And indeed, most of those things were good ideas. I'm influenced by my background. I have written many scientific papers. My approach to writing a paper is to identify one main conclusion that I want to convince the reader of, then require that every sentence marshall evidence for or against that conclusion. Fiction is different, but not SO different as all that. The corresponding idea in fiction is that every sentence should advance the plot....

Agent Carter Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Marvel Near the end of Captain America: The First Avenger  Steve Rogers dives his airplane into the sea in order to prevent it from reaching (and destroying) New York City. In a final radio conversation with Agent Peggy Carter, he makes a date to take her dancing next Saturday. Both of them know he will not make that date. Agent Carter  shows Peggy Carter's career after Steve's fall and after the end of the Second World War. The year is 1946, and she is an agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, a fictional secret organization that was the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. It is, I suspect, more or less based on the OSS , which was more or less the precursor to the CIA. Although she is one of SSR's most experienced and effective operatives, having had experience in the SOE  (a real English spy operation in World War II) before coming to the American side, Peggy is relegated to fetching coffee and answering phones by her bosse...

A Woman of No Importance Sonia Purnell Fiction writers operate under certain constraints. Their characters and plots have to be believable. Pile the implausible too high, and critics and readers will complain. ( Mea culpa .) Reality is not thus constrained. Thus, Virginia Hall, an American spy, a tall striking redhead who speaks French with an American accent, and has a wooden leg that she calls Cuthbert, who organizes Resistance forces in occupied France during the Second World War, and who assembles and leads a force of about 1000 Maquis (rural guerillas) that defeat the Germans and drive them out of Le Puy before the Allied invasion reaches it. (Cuthbert seems so gratuitous. I would shout to the heavens about a fictional spy with a wooden leg. But Virginia was real, and she really had a wooden leg, and she really called it Cuthbert.) And this is only one of Hall's exploits. Before that she was the Limping Lady of Lyon and the Abwehr and Gestapo were obsessed with her, but never ...