Brambles Intisar Khanani ** spoiler alert **  Brambles  is a prequel to  Intisar Khanani 's  Thorn . I read  Thorn  first, and because of that I already knew the story told in  Brambles . If you haven't read  Thorn , this review will contain spoilers. If you have read  Thorn , there are no spoilers in this review. At the beginning of  Thorn  we quickly learned that Princess Alyrra and her lady-in-waiting Valka are not simpatico. We learn why, but in a sketchy way. Alyrra caught Valka stealing jewelry. Valka blamed the theft on a maid. The maid was going to be hanged for the crime, and Alyrra could not bear that, so she ratted on Valka. Valka was not hanged -- hanging is for commoners. But she was disgraced. We learn all this in  Thorn . Brambles  is a novella or novelette that tells that story in detail. It's more than a short story. In fact, there are five chapters. It's good -- I felt I understand where Alyrra was coming...

Thorn Intisar Khanani The Goose Girl  (Die Gänsemagd in  the Grimm brothers ' original German) is one of the more obscure Grimm's Fairy Tales, by which I mean that it has never, to my knowledge, been made into a Disney Feature Film. This obscurity, I suspect, is because it is a disturbingly modern story, in the sense of not having clear heroes and villains. (The  Grimm brothers , however, perceived no such ambiguity. For them the princess is unequivocally good and the maid bad, in part because the princess has noble blood and the maid is common. Values have changed since those days.) The central story is that a princess takes off to marry the prince of a nearby kingdom, to whom she has long been engaged. She is accompanied by a maid. On the trip the maid forcibly swaps places with the princess and makes the princess, on pain of death, swear not to expose her. The princess takes this compelled oath much more seriously than any legal expert would advise. Arrived at the dest...

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up Dave Barry There is one living human who can write prose that makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe. That person is Tactical Assault Clown  Dave Barry .  Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up  had that effect on me at least twice -- an automatic five-star rating. ("Tactical Assault Clown" is right up there with "Combat Epistemologist" ( The Jennifer Morgue ) on my list of creative military specializations. And if you're one of those people who get their knickers all in a twist when someone uses parens inside of parens, you know what you can do about it.) (Yes, I know I'm not funny.) It's not all ROFL funny. In fact, he tells about his father's alcoholism ( that story has a happy ending ) and his mother's suicide ( that one obviously does not ). Later in the book he tries to convince us that his real li...

Wizard: The Life And Times Of Nikola Tesla Marc J. Seifer If you take part in Internet discussions that sometimes stray onto science, you have probably run into Tesla cultists. These are people who believe that Nikola Tesla was the greatest genius and greatest scientist of all time. I've always been puzzled by this, as looking at short-form biographies such as can be found in encyclopedias, Tesla didn't accomplish all that much. Oh, yeah, clearly he was a genius and a brilliant inventor and played a big role in radio and in making our current power grid practical. But he wasn't much of a scientist. (The cultists, among whom I count  Marc J. Seifer , fail to perceive the distinction between "inventor" and "scientist".) He never accepted the early 20th century physics revolution. He thought relativity was wrong, and as far as I can tell had nothing to say about quantum mechanics. So, I read this biography to better understand where all the Tesla worship co...

Mihi Ever After: A Giant Problem Tae Keller A Giant Problem  is the second book in  Tae Keller 's  Mihi Ever After  series. As you know if you've read  Mihi Ever After , there is a portal to a fairy tale world called the Rainbow Realm hidden in Mihi's school library refrigerator. Mihi stumbled into it with Savannah and Reese, with whom she is now fast friends. They resolved never to go back there, or even to talk about it. But it transpires that all three of them have been dreaming of the Rainbow Realm. (What could be less surprising, right?) Then Mihi kind of by-accident-on-purpose tells her old frenemy Genevieve, not expecting Genevieve to believe. But Mihi, Savannah, and Reese find Genevieve's backpack abandoned on the floor by the fridge. The Rainbow Realm is a dangerous place, and Genevieve is not prepared. Mihi, Savannah, and Reese decide they must rescue her. When they get to the Rainbow Realm they discover that there is trouble there -- a giant beanstalk...

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales Heather Fawcett Everyone seems to think that  Heather Fawcett 's  Emily Wilde  novels are a Cozy Fantasy series. I don't see it. I'm not saying you're wrong, if you think that. No one but you can tell you how you feel, and if Emily gives you a cozy feeling, then she just does, and there is no more to be said about it. But I just don't see it. In  Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries  Emily tortures a child, then defeats a terrifying fairy king in part by chopping off her own finger with an axe. In  Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands  she infiltrates a fairy kingdom and gets rid of the ruler by poisoning her. She has a familiar called Shadow who is a monstrous Black Hound. I'm not going to tell you what she does in  Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales , except to say that she doesn't dial it back. She terrifies even her romantic interest Wendell. He is not afraid she will harm him, but that she will, by...

The Heart of a Goof P.G. Wodehouse In a tiny bit of writing for a Creative Writing class, I wanted to use the word "goof" as a jocular insult in a story set in 1925. Looking up the usage history of "goof", I discovered  P.G. Wodehouse 's  The Heart of a Goof , published in 1926. So, home free! Except I have never had the sense to quit while I was ahead, and I got the book to find out if  Wodehouse 's usage is consistent with mine. It is not. (But I'm gonna do it, anyway.) The consolation prize, though, was that  The Heart of a Goof  is  Wodehouse  at the top of his game. It is literally laugh-out-loud funny. It is, it must be admitted, a one-joke book. But the joke is funny and subject to infinite variation. Heart of a Goof  is about golf. It consists of nine stories (golf allusion there!) told by the Oldest Member of the Club. The Oldest Member is a sort of  Ancient Mariner  of golf, who traps the unwary with his gaze and voice and reco...

Lake Silence Anne Bishop Lake Silence  continues  Anne Bishop 's series  The Others , except it doesn't quite.  The Others  consists of five novels about blood prophet Meg Corbyn and the city of Lakeside, which is located where, on Earth, Buffalo, New York is. Lakeside and Meg, however, are on Namid, a world that is geographically much like Earth, but ruled mostly by beings that call themselves  terra indigene , who regard humans as prey. In  The Others  a group of profoundly stupid and badly informed humans take on the Others (as they call the  terra indigene ) and are very nearly wiped out. A few humans survive by learning to live with the  terra indigene . The story of Meg finished, we now move on to a different part of Namid and other humans. Three such novels constitute the successor series the  World of the Others . We don't actually move very far.  Lake Silence  takes place on the shores of Lake Silence, one of the ...

Theatre of Cruelty Terry Pratchett Theatre of Cruelty  is a short story in or attached to  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series. You can read it for free on the  L-web . Goodreads lists it as #14.5, that is, between  Lords and Ladies  and  Men at Arms . It serves to re-introduce the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, whom we last (and first) heard from in  Guards! Guards! . It is a useful reminder of who Sargent Colon, Corporal Nobbs, Captain Vimes, and Constable Carrot are. Nobby and Colon discover a suspicious death. Being constitutionally incapable of taking any constructive action, ever, they bring the problem to Captain Vimes, who assigns it to Constable Carrot to investigate. The mystery involves a swozzle, an object I had never heard of before. This was pretty good. Funny, in the usual  Pratchett ian style (unlike the tedious  Death and What Comes Next ), and quite short -- about a thousand words. It definitely helps to know the chara...

Moment 15 -- The Body In The River. Pitlochry January 1978 Ben Aaronovitch Our Ben has announced the release of the next Rivers of London novel, Stone and Sky . As has now become customary, he accompanies the announcement with a Moment. The main things we learn from this Moment are  We're headed to Scotland. We meet a new Genius loci , another river She has electric mojo, perhaps borrowed somehow from her hydroelectric dam. We meet a new human character, Ian Meikle. Ian appears to have been a young man in 1978. There is a suggestion that he might be a doctor, since he considers discharging himself from the hospital. I hope we will meet him again in  Stone and Sky , though, if we do, he must by now be rather aged. Stone and Sky  announcement  

Adventures of a Mathematician S.M. Ulam Have you ever heard of  Stan Ulam ? If you're a normal person (by which I mean, mostly, not a scientist or a mathematician), the answer is probably no. If you have heard of him, what you have heard, most likely, is that he played an important role in the development of thermonuclear bombs. ("Thermonuclear" means roughly the same thing as "H bomb", as opposed to fission bombs such as the ones detonated on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.) If you're a mathematician, you have probably heard his name in connection with an impressive list of mathematical thingies like theorems, conjectures, numbers, etc.  Wikipedia lists a dozen such things . In fact, the breadth of this list is more impressive than its length. His contributions range from analysis to number theory via topology, etc. He was one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century. If you're a mathematician,  Ulam 's work has probably been relevant t...

The Big Chunk of Ice: The Last Known Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club Bertrand R. Brinley Bertrand R. Brinley 's  The Big Chunk of Ice  was not published during the author's life. His son, Sheridan dug up the manuscript after Purple House Press successfully reprinted the previous  Mad Scientists' Club  books. He (Sheridan) wrote a brief Introduction explaining the origins of the story (or its setting) in his father's Army experiences in Austria. He also added an epilogue based on some notes made by his father about the real people and places behind the story. He doesn't explain why the book was not published during  Bertrand Brinley 's life. Fans of the  Mad Scientists' Club , among whom I count myself, are likely to find this one disappointing. There is little of what I loved in  The Mad Scientists' Club . Henry Mulligan's creatively subversive technical innovations play little role. Instead, the MSC goes on a trip to Austria with Professor...

Lords and Ladies Terry Pratchett Every  Discworld  novel (or, at least, every one I have yet read) begins with this claim: INTRODUCING DISCWORLD… The Discworld novels can be read in any order, ... Lords and Ladies  is no exception. A few pages later, though,  Sir Terry  has inserted a contradictory Author's Note: By and large, most Discworld books have stood by themselves, as complete books. It helps to have read them in some kind of order, but it’s not essential. This one is different. I can’t ignore the history of what has gone before... Indeed,  Lords and Ladies  would be an incomplete and confusing story to the naïve reader who took seriously  Pratchett 's claim that the Discworld novels can be read in any order. You really need to know who Granny Weatherwax and Magrat Garlick are. (You could pick up everything you need to know about Nanny Ogg on the fly -- she's the comic relief.) I was surprised to find that, more than anything else,  L...

On Writing Well William Zinsser William Zinsser 's  On Writing Well  seems to me to have the same purpose as  Strunk  and  White 's  The Elements of Style , only three times longer. If you know  The Elements of Style , you already see the problem. "Omit needless words" is the central message of  The Elements of Style . A book with the same purpose, but three times longer must include many unneeded words. I could say more, but those would be needless words. Not recommended. On Writing Well  on Amazon Goodreads review