The Saturday Morning Post (No. 28) The 2023 Reading Wrap-up

With the end of 2023, the time has rolled around again to look back on the books I've read this past year. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

This year I started 108 books, finished 93, with 15 DNF books. I have never read more books in a year than in 2023.

In 2022 I started 40 books, finished 25 of them, again, with 15 DNF books. I have to go back into the ancient past, soon after the dinosaurs died off, to find my second best year for reading. That was the year 1966, when I read 100 books, all of them science fiction. The following year I recorded reading 57 SF books, and the only other record I have of books read runs from Feb. 1970 to April 1971. In it I recorded 77 books, which now include more than SF books. There were many years when I may have read only a dozen, or less, especially in the years when I was writing my own books.

So why did I read so many books this year? I think that I can list several reasons.

The first is that I am a fairly fast reader. Not a speed reader, but I can read most books within two or three days. We're looking at 2 books a week for 2023, so I'm not exactly reading at a breakneck pace.

The second reason was that I was not writing for most of the year. I did some revisions on The Girl on the Kerb at the beginning of the year, and I only returned to writing, an hour a day, in October, so that I had the time, and more importantly, the mental bandwidth to read. In the past, I did not like to read books when I had my story in mind and was trying to write it down. One story in my head was enough. So the lack of serious writing left a space in my life that could be filled with reading.

A third factor was that about a year and a half ago, I realized that science fiction wasn't my bag anymore, and probably hadn't been for some time. As a result, I went on a quest to find new genres to read. At first I tried free books from Amazon in a coupe of different genres, with so-so results. But they broke the iron hold SF had on me. I've moved on in two directions. I'm now giving books and authors a try based on recommendations by people in blogs and on the BookTube channels. In addition, I've been rereading some of my favorite books from my selves, many of them for the first time in decades.

And finally, I've been reviewing at least one book every week for this blog. That puts a certain pressure on me to keep reading. The good news on that front, for me, at least, is that I think I have 15 books that I read this year that I have yet to post reviews for. I've got some breathing room. I don't mind falling behind.

I don't know how many books I'll end up reading in 2024. I don't look on it as a contest. I have no goals. We'll see what develops. but honestly, I would be surprised if I got around to reading 92 books in 2024. There are only so many good books.

In any event, below are a list of my best reads for 2023; books that earned an A grade from me, in no particular order. I find it impossible to rank books. The links to the reviews may include other books as well. The (RR) indicates a reread, and  the "?" in the case of the Ellis Peters books because I'm not sure what titles from the library I read 30 years ago.

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara A-       My review

Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen A-  (RR)     My review

The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham  A    My review

The High Window by Raymond Chandler A  (RR)     My review

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler  A   (RR)     My review  (a very short one)

Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser A+  (RR)

H. M. S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian  A+ (RR)     My review  includes Flashman 

Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson A   My review

Boy in the Blitz by Colin Perry  A  (RR)    My review

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  A-/B+    My review

IN GOD WE TRUST  All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd  A  (RR)   My review

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment by D E Stevenson  A      Stay tuned, review coming

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters  A  (RR??)   Stay tuned, review coming

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters  A   (RR)       Stay tuned, review coming

Lessons in Chemistry  by Bonni Garmus  A   Stay Tuned, review coming

Saint Peter's Fair by Ellis Peters  A   (RR?)    Stay Tuned, review coming

While my A list includes a lot of rereads, I think that can be simply explained by the fact that the only books I'm going to bother rereading are my favorites. Most of them I haven't read in 10 to 30 plus years, so they were often as fresh as my first (or second) reading.

As for the books that didn't quite make an A; I find that I have read;

31 B books, i.e. books I really liked, many of them just falling short of an A

46 C books, average books. I DNF books that I don't like, so they're good but not great books for me.

1   D book, that I kept reading hoping for the best, but it kept getting worse.

15 DNFed books that I sampled but did not suit my tastes.

Sneak Preview of 2024 reads:

I found those Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books so enjoyable that I went online to Abe books and ordered all 16 Cadfael mysteries in the 3 book omnibuses version, so you can expect to be seeing reviews of those mysteries scattered throughout the year.

There is of course, the big one; Jasper Fforde's Red Side Story the book that I've been waiting for a decade plus to read.

And... Well, I can't say I can see further into the future than anyone else, so I don't know what else will tickle my fancy. Probably some more rereads from my shelves. Stay tuned.

How was your 2023 in reading?

My storehouse of good books

Under The Hood Changes

During the next week or two I'll be making some under the hood changes in my publishing arrangements. These changes are sparked by my discovery that Apple is now offering to convert ebooks into auto-narrated audiobooks, for free. My experience with these auto-generated audiobooks on Google has been entirely positive. Indeed, more than 1/3 of my book sales now come from audiobooks and their ratings match the ebook versions. So why not?

At the beginning of my publishing venture, I used two venders; Smashwords which also distributes my books to Apple, B & N, and Kobo, and Amazon. Some five years ago I added Google to my list. And when Draft2Digital bought out Smashwords, I added Draft2Digital, mostly as place holder against whatever developed with that purchase. At the present, I only offer my books via D2D in the two European ebook stores D2D serves. However, when I discovered that Apple was offering to convert ebooks to audiobooks, I decided that I needed to make some changes.

I always thought that, Apple being Apple, I would need to own a Mac computer and use their word processor program Pages, to publish directly to the Apple store, and since I could sell there via Smashwords, I never gave it another thought. Until now. With the lure of audiobooks on Apple, I investigated what I needed to do. Did I really need to own a Mac to list my books directly with Apple? As it turns out, no. You can upload ePUB files directly to the Apple store, which is what I do for Google. Suddenly, my prospects looked bright. I went and created new generic  ePUB versions of my books as my Google versions had "Google Version" on the copyright page. However, when I looked into audio books further, I discovered that these conversions are done through some trusted partners... Long story short, do your research thoroughly. 

Luckily, Draft2Digital was the prime trusted partner. I will need to look into it further, but I believe all I will have to do is to list my Apple editions through D2D to be able to take advantage of the audiobook feature. 

As eager as I am to do this, I suppose that I need to take a breath, and do things step-by-step. The first step will be to pull all my books from every Smashwords vender save Smashwords itself. I will do that this Friday. Then I  will relist them to every outlet D2D distributes to on Monday just to give the vendors time to drop the Smashwords editions before adding the 2D2 versions. I don't know if this is necessary - Apple now lists D2D as my publisher in the book data, but just to be on the safe side, I'll give them some time to avoid any confusion. Hopefully, once I have my books on Apple with D2D, I can get them converted. I'll keep you informed. 

I don't know what to expect from Apple audiobooks. They only offer 3 male and 3  female narrator voices, compared to Google's a dozen plus each, and one of those is a very serious voice for non-fiction. They have one voice for fiction & romance, and one for SF and fantasy. I like the fiction and romance voice slightly better, but I much prefer my choice with Google. But beggars can't be chooser. As for sales, who knows? Google dwarfs my ebook sales on Apple, but, on the other hand, Apple iPhones have 50% of the US market, and a lot of people read books and audiobooks on their phones or in the car on their commutes via their phones. Apple customers tend to be more well heeled than Android customers, so the free price of my audiobooks may not be all that big a draw on Apple. Still, who knows? I intend to find out.

However, nothing is a done deal at the moment. I'll update you next week on how things are going. If all goes well, you'll soon be able to listen to my stories on your iPhone or iPad. Stay turned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 27)

This time around we have a book that you are almost certainly know part of, but likely have never read. Parts of the book were adopted into a movie that became a seasonal favorite. Indeed, I can remember a time when the movie ran on TV back to back for 24 hours on Christmas eve & day. However, it was chopped up into 5 minute sections to fit in all the commercials, making it nearly impossible to enjoy. The book it it is base on is a lot more obscure, but shouldn't be since it is a masterpiece of humor. Let's get to it... 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

IN GOD WE TRUST, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd   A

The movie is 1983's A Christmas Story and the book it draws its story from this book. The book is a semi-fictional account of Jean Shepherd's youth and teen years growing up in depression era Hohman Indiana. Jean Shepherd was late night radio DJ, writer, and screenwriter. Many of stories in this book, and his other three similar books, were written to read on his late night radio show in New York city. The premise of this book is the semi-fictional Ralphie, now grown up and living in New York city, returns to Hohman to write for a magazine, "The Return Of The Native To The Indiana Mill Town". His first stop upon arrival is the bar of his old friend Flick's dad, which Flick now runs. They get to reminiscing which gives the reader a series of several dozen short tales about growing up in Hohman in the 1930's, interspersed with a few interludes of "Ralph's" present day life.

Shepherd co-wrote the screen play for the movie A Christmas Story, and did the voice over narration for it. The movie weaves various episodes from the book into its Christmas setting. The main Christmas story in the book concerns the Official Red Ryder Range Model Air Rifle that Ralphie wants for Christmas. Other episodes are adopted from different time periods which are folded into the movie as well, such as the fight with the bully, and the "major prize" his father wins from that orange soda company.

The book vividly evokes life in the grim and grimy steel mill and oil refinery city of Hohman, just to the east of Chicago where "the natives had been idle so long that they no longer even considered themselves out of work. Work had ceased to exist, so how could you be out of it?" He tells his stories with a great deal of humor and exaggeration, which nevertheless recreates a very real time and place in America.

The movie was set in 1940, and I was born ten years later and grew up in Milwaukee, a hour or so north of Chicago, so neither the book or movie exactly describes my life. Any yet, in 1950's were close enough to the '20's & 40's in some ways, that his description of life resonates with me, and adds to the humor and charm of this book. I wonder if how younger readers would find this book?

Humor is a tricky thing. Something one person finds hilarious, another just shake their head. So it is hard to say if you would find this book as funny as I do. I will leave it up to you by ending this review with two small section, selected more or less at random form a longer story that describes a night  Ralphie spent fishing with his dad on northern Indiana lake.

"Naturally, fishing is different in Indiana. The muddy lakes, about May, when the sun starts beating down on them, would begin to simmer and bubble quietly around the edges. These lakes are not fed by springs or streams. I don’t know what feeds them. Maybe seepage. Nothing but weeds and truck axles, on the bottoms; flat, low, muddy banks, surrounded by cottonwood trees, cattails, smelly marshes and old dumps. Archetypal dumps. Dumps gravitate to Indiana lakes like flies to a hog killing. Way down at the end where the water is shallow and soupy are the old cars and the ashes, busted refrigerators, oil drums, old corsets, and God knows what else.

At the other end of the lake is the Roller Rink. There’s always a Roller Rink. You can hear that old electric organ going, playing “Heartaches,” and you can hear the sound of the roller skates;

Shhhhhh...sssshhhhhhh….ssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh…."

As for fishing; 

"Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, create by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic-plague bacillus. They have never been know to fight, or even faintly struggle. I guess when're a crappie, you figure it's no use anyway. One thing is as bad as the another. They're just down there in the soup. No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everyone is fishing for them. At two in the morning.

Each boat contains a minimum of nine guys and fourteen cases of beer. And once in a while, in the darkness, is heard the sound of a buy falling over backward into the slime: SSSSGKUNK

"Oh! Ah! Help, help! A piteous cry in the darkness. Another voice;

"Hey, for God's sake, Charlie's fallen in again! Grab the oar!"

And then it slowly dies down. Charlie is hauled out of the goo and is lying on the bottom of the boat, urping up dead lizards and Atlas Prager. Peace reigns again."

Scenes from the movie A Christmas Story;

 

Winter in Cealanda

 

For the last 30 some years I've traveled the highways and byways of the imaginary land of Cealanda, stopping where I will to paint scenes that I found interesting. It seems that I like to travel just as long as long as I can do it in my imagination and not actually have to go anywhere. While I have done a bit of traveling in my life, including a "Grand Tour" after college; 2 1/2 months traveling around Britain via British Rail on my own, I don't travel anymore, except form my virtual rides on trains and busses via YouTube and in my imagination. Plus, I do a lot imaginary traveling these days for my stories, just as I did it for my paintings. 

Seeing that today we're at or near the winter solstice, the most "wintery" time of year, even though we have like 4 months of winter following the solstice around these parts, I figured I'd post a few of my paintings of winter in Cealanda. They can also serve as my Christmas cards to you, dear readers.

The watercolor painting above is of an alley in Pangone, an district of Willowsea a city, which I frequently. The stables have mostly been converted to dwellings and workshops. Below is a view of an enclosed court in Willowsea.

Watercolor winter scenes worked for me because the white of the snow separates colors so that they don't bleed together. It keeps the paintings crisp as you can see in the painting below. If all the snow was grass, things would tend to bleed together, at least for me.

Above are two rural scenes, the lower one I know to be painted with acrylic paint on watercolor canvas. The upper one maybe. Otherwise it is watercolor on paper.

A bit of background. At the age of 53 I quite my day job to be come a full time starving artist. I was quite successful at the starving part. One thing I quickly learned was that oil paintings commanded a whole lot more money than watercolors. So if I was not to starve, I needed to teach myself how to paint in oils. Given time constrains - I didn't have 20 years to learn how to paint in oil - as well as personal preference, I adopted the impressionist style of painting and made it my own. After a year or two, I switched to painting with acrylics on hardboard because oils took so long to dry, painting them on stretched canvas made shipping them to customers somewhat iffy, moreover, I found that I could do almost every thing that I wanted in acrylic paints and do it easier than in oils. Below are several samples of my paintings (thick) acrylic impressionist paintings.

I could go on and on, as I have painted probably 2000 paintings. I have a link to my on line galleries on the right, if you care to see more of my work in paint. My wife likes my watercolor style paintings, though the later ones in that style were actually painted using acrylic paint on watercolor canvas, but I like my thicker, impressionist style paintings better. And I know best.

In any and all events, Happy Holiday season whatever holiday you celebrate, or just survive, like me. 

Above an oil painting, on stretched canvas below a watercolor on paper

The Saturday Morning Post (No.26)

More rereads this week. While I was waiting on some library books I went to my book shelf and picked out the next two books from my favorite fantasy series; Garret P.I. by Glen Cook. I had read the proceeding ones sometime in the last year or so.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Dread Brass Shadows By Glen Cook  B+

Red Iron Nights by Glen Cook  B+

I may've mentioned once, or twice, or three times before that I'm not much of a lad for fantasy, and yet it seems that I'm always reviewing fantasy books. Hard to explain. In the case of these books, however, it can be easily explained by the fact that I first started reading them thirty-some years ago, when the division between fantasy and SF wasn't all that wide. That, and the fact that they are a mashup of hardboiled detective fiction and fantasy, and being a big fan of Raymond Chandler, I was naturally ready to give that mashup a try. Since then I've read all 14 of them written between 1987 to 2013 several times over the years. They're that good.

Make no mistake, Glen Cook is no Raymond Chandler when it comes to prose. He keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek with his private eye narrator, Garrett, ex-Fleet Marine. ".. and I were heroes of the Cantard Wars. That means we did our five years and got out alive. A lot of guys don't." He likes women, and women like him - the stories are not quite "woke", having been written before that became a thing. Nevertheless, the stories feature plenty of independent women with agency. Just say'n. 

Probably what made me pick up the first Garrett PI book was its cover that shows Garrett in his office, dressed in a trench coat, smoking a cigarette with fedora on the hat rack, facing four dwarfs, one totting a submachine gun. The artist took a great deal of artistic license with this cover. Garrett doesn't smoke, doesn't go around in trench coats, doesn't wear fedoras, nor are there any firearms in this world. Even swords are banned in the city. Even so, it succeeds in giving the potential reader an accurate the flavor of the story. All the covers of the other books are equally inaccurate, still feature Garrett as a modern looking PI, for the same reason; mood.

Glen Cook is the author of the "Black Company" books which recount the grim lives of various mercenary bands in a long war. They are sometimes considered the first "grimdark" fantasy novels. But in the Garrett PI series, while there are certainly dark deeds and scenes, evil people and creatures, he employs the wise-cracking Garrett as the narrator, who lightens up these stories with humor and wry observations on humanity, politics and religion.

Cooks sets this series in a world wracked by a long running war in the region known as the Cantard, which is rich in silver. This war is being fought by armies, fueled by the universal draft of human males, and sorcerers, who use silver to power their magic. With the exception of the first book, Sweet Silver Blues, which takes us to the Cantard, all the rest of the books take place in and near the mean anc colorful streets of TunFaire. Humans share the world, and TunFaire with just about every sort of mythical being, god, and creature you can think of. I mean that. In these stories you'll meet dwarfs, elves, giants, goblins, gnomes, fairies, pixies, vampires, werewolves, centaurs, gargoyles, "thunder-lizards" and flying dragons, rat people, shape shifters, all sorts of "breeds", assorted gods, aliens, and, a dead Loghyr, whose body is long dead, but whose telepathic mind isn't. Trust me, TunFaire has a very diverse population. 

Against this colorful backdrop, Cook sets a very typical, intricate, and inventive series of detective stories. They fall well within the hardboiled detective formula. Garrett is a good guy who often gets beaten up as he attempts to help clients who have come to him in some sort of trouble. After the first story whose proceeds enable him to buy the house that hosts the dead Loghyr, the "Dead Man", making it his fortress headquarters. The Dead Man acts something like Mycroft Holmes, a thinker, who can read mines, and use his own to control others close at hand. In addition Garrett has a group of friends/associates, whose aid he can call on, when needed, which is often. This including the fussy old man Dean, who comes to cook and look after him and the house, Morley Dotes, a vegetarian restaurateur and hired assassin, Saucerhead Tharpe, a thug for hire, Playmate, a black stable owner and would be preacher, and a host of other characters who, over the course of the series, become part of his entourage, becoming something of a "found family" or a band of brothers, that adds a familiar and cozy vibe to the series as it goes on. Arrayed against him can be the powerful mob boss of TunFaire and his hardboiled henchmen, plus kidnappers, powerful and corrupt sorcerers, churchmen, and various other baddies.

Well, I've gotten this far without saying much of anything about the books I'm supposed to be reviewing. I'm not going to say much about them as they are intricate, and I read them a couple of weeks ago...  Moreover, while each story can stand on its own, each installment adds a layer of meaning to the series, so that you should start with Sweet Silver Blues, and read your way through them. Still for the sake of a brief overview; Garrett's case in Dread Brass Shadows involves a book of magic engraved in brass sheets, with each page describing a different powerful person or creature, which if read, will turn the reader into that type of person or creature. Magic too powerful to be allowed to exist. And in Red Iron Nights, Garrett helps the local police force track down an ancient curse that has reappeared in TunFaire, one which compels the person who has it to ritually kill a certain type of young woman. Can Garret find the source of the curse before it kills again? As I said intricate mysteries with lots of colorful side characters. 

Given the reputation Cook has for his Dark Company books, I don't understand why these, and several other of his fantasy series are so overlooked. But then, I suspect that a lot of fantasy books from 20 or more years ago, are overlooked these days by contemporary fantasy readers, because there is just so much  contemporary fantasy to read instead.

The Sunsets of Summer 2023

 

I usually try to spend every day in just a'settin in my rocking chair watch'n the sun set on another summer's day - when the sunset is visible. The summer of 2023 was not a vintage year for sunsets. Pretty ones were few and far between. I think there were two factors that may've worked against photographable sunsets. The first was that it was a pretty dry summer, so that by the time the sun was setting, there the sky was usually cloudless. The second factor was that between the smoke from Canada burning, the heat and the ozone, the sun often disappeared behind a smuggy layer of smoke and ozone before it ever reached the distant hills.

The photo above and directly below are actually looking east at sunset, away from the setting sun. You getz what photos you can.

The photos below are now looking to the west, to the sunset. The first one is  towards the southwest, the trailing edge of a little thunder storm.

The one below, we're looking a bit to the north west for probably the most dramatic photo of an actual sunset this summer.

The photo below was taken on a threatening evening when everything was  very orange. It was taken on the same evening as the second photo above, this time looking west.

And finally a very mellow sunset, just a step up from the bog standard sunsets of 2023. Not a lot of clouds, but the air was free enough from smoke for the sun to set behind the hills and clouds over Minnesota. 

Oh well, there's always next year. Maybe. I'm at that age where you have to always add "maybe" when talking about next year. Just standard procedure. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 25)

This week I came across a series of books while waking through the stacks of the local library, and picked up two of them, An Irish Country Village, and An Irish Country Courtship by Patrick Taylor.

My reviewer criteria.

I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

An Irish Country Village by Patrick Taylor  DNF 10%

This is apparently a series of 17 books, many of them set in the small fictional village of Ballybuckledo in Northern Ireland. The series is set in the late 1960's and concerns a new doctor taking up practice in the village with an older doctor. A patient of the new doctor has died and he must regain the regard of the village. If you imagine All Creatures Great and Small, with doctors instead of vets, set in the 60's instead of the 30's, and in Ireland instead of the North of England, you will know the story format. While I enjoyed All Creatures Great and Small (the old TV show more than the books) this story didn't work for me for several reasons.

The first element was the writing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it simply didn't click with me. It seemed rather simple, YA-ish almost, not very cohesive, and rather repetitive. And yet, there was this frequent abruptness in the scenes that I often left me briefly lost. The writing just didn't flow. I found that I had to work to read it. Still the spine of the library book did have a sticker with a butterfly on it, that said "Gentle Read" for what that's worth.

Next, the characters seemed unrealistic, again for a reason I couldn't put my finger on. Perhaps because of the writing, and perhaps because this was the second book in the series and I had missed too much. The first book wasn't on the shelf, so there may be an assumption on the part of the author that the reader would know the characters better than I did, starting from where I did. The third thing; it read too much like an All Creatures Great and Small knock off. You have the somewhat outrageous, but wise older doctor and the young, somewhat insecure, new doctor, just trying to work his way into the practice and the local inhabitants. The older doctor struck me too much like Siegfried, at least in the original TV series version of that character. Why settle for a knock off?

And the fourth thing was that the author, a doctor himself, spent too much time describing every little medical treatments, step by step, something that just doesn't interest me at all.

When I have to force myself to read a book, I know that the book isn't for me. And I simply found myself putting it down with no desire to continue reading it at around the 50 page mark of a 500 page book. Lord knows how he strung the story out that long. I won't know.

Blame it on Harry

Two weeks ago I wrote about how much more popular fantasy was than science fiction, something like a factor of 4 to 1. This past Friday evening, I had confirmation of that result. It was an eye opening experience.

I was drafted into providing dinner for a number of my wife's relatives who had arrived in town for "Cookie Bake Weekend". My sister-in-law had brought along a copy of the fantasy/romance book Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros, the sequel to The Fourth Wing, which if you recall dominated the ratings in the Goodread's Best Book of 2023 list for romantasy. It has sold more than 800,000 copies to date. I gathered that it was a spare copy. Her daughter, Julia had gotten the special edition, and she wondered if Sadie, my granddaughter, would be interested in it. Of course she would. She's been into fantasy since her mom read Harry Potter to her before she could read, and has been reading fantasy ever since. Dark fantasy with romance, which, I gather is what she loves, and which The Fourth Wing and Iron Flame very much are. Sadie had already read The Fourth Wing and so had the 30-some year old Julia, and her two friends, as well as my daughter. Most had also read or were reading the Iron Flame as well. It was quite a confab, crimped only by trying to avoid spoilers nor was it confined to just those books, but others of that vein as well. I gather they had much more to say while making cookies the following day; after Sadie stayed up to 11 getting a start on Iron Flame. 

Moreover, in a break in the conversation I asked Sadie how she enjoyed the Dungeons and Dragons club at the high school that she joined. She said that loves it, and discovered that one of Julia's friends plays D & D with her friends every Tuesday, so they had D & D stuff to talk about as well.

Of course this is not a true cross section of women age 15 to 40-something, but I think it shows just how powerful J K Rowling's influence was on the millennial/Gen Z generation. There is no doubt in my mind that the Harry Potter series written between 1997 to 2007 shaped the reading tastes of two generations of readers.

My daughter would have been just entering college with the first book appeared, and since I got a Harry Potter book each year for Christmas, she must have been reading them as well. Plus I have several slightly younger nieces who I know are also into fantasy, dating from the Harry Potter era and all those YA fantasies that followed.

And it seems that all those first generation Harry Potter fans have now been reading Harry Potter books to their children ever, which I think goes a long way to explaining the growing popularity of fantasy today. Of course Sadie and her younger brother were also Star Wars fans when young, but middle school/YA fantasy books are much more numerous than SF, and perhaps more approachable as well. And it seems, much more appealing to girls and women. My daughter did read the Harry Potter stories to my grandson as well, but he's more into sports and Roadblox than reading, which I guess is fairly typical for boys.

So as the title suggests, I think that fantasy owes a great debt to Harry Potter. There was the Lord of the Rings, and scores of it imitators prior to Harry Potter, but the J K Rowling's books struck such a wide and resounding cord in the young readers of that time, that I think those books overshadow all those other fantasy books combined. And I have no reason to believe that this second generation of Harry Potter/fantasy fans won't be reading Harry Potter to their kids just as soon as they can.

The Saturday Morning Post (No, 24)

Today we take a look at a hybrid biography/autobiography of a fictional woman, as an early scientist in the field of botany. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert  B

This novel encompasses the fictional life story of Alma Whittaker. Born in 1800 Philadelphia, the daughter of a wealthy botanical explorer/business man, and a Dutch mother who comes from a family of Dutch horticulturalists. We follow her life from her childhood to a ripe old age of 80. Raised in wealth on a large estate outside of Philadelphia, she is encouraged to explore the natural world from an early age. Gifted with the plain speaking logical mind of her mother, and the drive for knowledge of her father, over the course of decades she becomes a respected botanist within a circle of scientist of similar interest, despite being a woman, eventually becoming the world's most respected expert on mosses.

As I mentioned in my brief intro, this book reads, in parts, like the biography of a real person. Indeed, like many biographies, the first 80 some pages doesn't even concern her at all, but rather describes the early career of her father, written in the style of a popular biography, which is to say with wit and charm. Though it includes many details of the time and places, it still moves nicely along. As does the whole book, for the most part. It is told as a biographer might tell the tale - "told" being the operative word, rather than shown. However, it also reveals many intimate details and thoughts of Alma Whittaker that would only be known to Alma Whittaker, and set down as a very candid modern autobiographer, thus its somewhat of a hybrid between the two types of biographies. It also presents scenes and conversations between people, as one would find in a novel, so that respect, it is a double hybrid; biography/autobiography/novel.

I found this book mentioned in one of James Harris' recent posts. He describes it as science fiction - not as the type of book we think of when we hear science fiction, but as a book of fiction that concerns itself with science. And that is what is it is; a story about about science and the times, as well about the role of women in the world, the world's expectations of them. And about the women who defy those expectations. 

Perhaps the most profound thing that I came away with, after reading this book, is how deficient we are these days in new things to discover. Tangible things, things we can see, touch, understand. This book, has Alma's father sending people around the world to discover and ship home new plants to describe and grow in his greenhouses. Tangible new discoveries. Not software code or quantum mechanics. Oh, I am sure there are still a million things to discover, but they have become increasingly esoteric, things so small in scope that it takes years and PhDs to discover, study and appreciate them. These days it seems that fantasy fiction has come to overshadows science fiction, and I have to wonder that is, in part, because there seems to be so few things left to discover in science, things that would interest more than a PhD searching for grant money.

Anyways, back to the book. Elizabeth Gilbert has written a very entertaining novel, despite reading more like a work of non-fiction for much of the time. Perhaps that is its strength; its biographical format allows the reader to believe that Alma Whittaker was a real person, while its very candid autobiographical makes her more than the subject of a biography written a century after the person lived. My only criticism of the book is that I think it went on too long and simply got too wordy, for my tastes in the last quarter of the book, so that I found myself skim reading parts of the story set in Tahiti. But, as usual, that's on me, not the author. I don't have the attention span I may've once had.

It's a solid read, offering a thick slice of history, science, with a glimpse of life in Tahiti as a bonus.