The Saturday Morning Post (No.196)

 

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

Guess what. You do get a break. A book I had on hold at the library that came in, so here we go.

The author of this book is someone I came across several years ago as one of the hosts of The Publishing Rodeo Podcast where she and another author interviewed author guests highlighting some of the darker alleys of traditional publishing. All very interesting. She just released her second novel in May, so I put my request for a hold on it. I've now read it, and here's my thoughts.

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 Girl With a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean C-

A big disappointment. I finished it, but I did a lot of skimming to do so, hence a C- is the best grade I can give it. It should've been better. Modern writing...

The story has as split time line. One time line is set in Hong Kong's Kowloon's Walled City in 1975 with the second on a small island close to Hong Kong prior to and during World War ll. Plus, there's some in between time as well. Yep, it's one of them stories that have you jumping back and forth in time. It's set in a fantasy version of our world, mostly the same, except that ghosts are real and can interact with the living. The rules of ghosts seem rather flexible, i.e. as in whatever the author needs for a ghost to do for the story to work the way she wants it. The basic concept is that anyone who is not properly buried, and who has unresolved issues in their lives, become ghosts, at least for a while. Or first protagonist, Mercy Chan, is a rare person who can talk to these ghosts in order to resolve their issues so that they can move on to whatever. She works for the triad boss who runs things in Kowloon Walled City, and this is part of the triad's service for the "dues" they collect from everyone. 

The books starts with a hook, Mercy dealing with a disgruntled grandmother who has a bone to pick with her son. He stole her money and left her to die. She is not a happy ghost.

Hook over, we then go back to 1941 with Mercy washing ashore as a young lady without a memory of her past. She ends up working for the Chinese resistance to the brutal Japanese occupation, and after the war is employed by that triad boss.

Then it's back to 1975, where she gets assigned to deal with a powerful ghost or demon who is killing a lot of people. She starts her investigation, finds the ghost/demon...

And then, this is around the 30% point now, the story changes, yet again. All that went before was just a bigger hock, because we now go back to learn about Mercy Chan's past, the part she can't remember. The style of narration changes for this part of the story, it is now being told in second person by the Goddess Kwun Yam. We end up on a small island haunted by ghosts with various twists and turns follow, only to then follow another character back to the present. Very confusing, especially when you're skim reading.

So why a C- grade from me?

First, the writing style is very plain. I've seen it called YA in reviews. I don't read YA as a rule, so I can't say it is,  all I can say is that the author's voice had no character. I think this is a modern trait, getting rid of all those useless adjectives, and such. I found the characters uninteresting, and jumping around so much didn't help me connect to her or one of them. I guess you were supposed to be invested in the mystery of her origin, but if you aren't interested in her, why should you care about her past? You know that all you have to do is sit back and be told about it no matter what. 

The there was the view point change. The first 30% was third person, but the remainder was, as I said, told in second person by a Chinese goddess to Mercy Chan, as in "You studied it intently..." or 'You flushed." "You then... etc." I find second person annoying, but I did put up with it, though for the life of me, there seemed no reason to write in that style, as it was just relating the character's back story. Usually second person is used to convey a sense of urgency drawing the reader in. 

And of course, all this hopping back and forth in time, which I see as slicing and dicing a story to make is seem more complex than it is, and in this case to hide a "clever" twist.

All in all, a very modern story for readers who like very modern storytelling. I don't, so it wasn't for me. The book has a 4.02 rating on Goodreads, with 4,600 ratings, the largest bar the 4 star rating, so that I think a lot of people, even if they like it, see it's problems as well. As someone who talked about hidden parts of publishing and how brutal it can be, I will note that her debut novel from 2022 as 59,000 ratings, though a 3.6 star rating. Given that most books sell the most copies in the first three months of release, I don't see this book selling as well as her debut. She has one more book on contract. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about this experience, if they continue the podcast.

Taking Back the Day

Not a great photo, but you have to take what you can get. Taken shortly before sundown this past Sunday. You also get the last of my hollyhocks, and a corner of the hammock slung under our deck where I idle the summer away. When my wife lets me have it.

This summer the neighborhood deer apparently have decided to take back the day. They're no longer going to be creatures of the night, as they have been in the past. They're not going to slink around in the moonlight to eat our flowers. Nope. They're going to do it in broad daylight. The salad bar is now open all day long. This has been a very noticeable change in behavior. Seeing deer out and about at any hour of the day has made them, almost, as common a sight as squirrels.  

Eau Claire has a large deer population. All the parks have their herds, as does every wood lot of any size, of which there are many around the city. My son, who takes long walks after work reports that deer just stand 10 - 15 feet away and watch him him pass when walking along the bike trail through a small wood lot. Not quite tame, but not shy either.

In the past I've seen deer about, but usually around sunset, like in the photo above. Which is about the time they begin venture out from local wood lot of the school below our hill. I call them wood lots, as they are usually less than 50 meters wide, not true woods, just lots with trees and underbrush.

The faint white path on the grass is  a track that the deer have trampled down this year in our backyard. They run just along the retaining wall which is about 30 ft from where I hang out on the hammock. 

One March day several years ago I happened to see a herd of maybe 15 or more deer running down the street and into our condo complex, heading... well who knows where? Likely the wood lot on the school property, no doubt they'd been kicked up from some other wood lot on the other side of the neighborhood. In short, we have a large urban deer population.

But, as I said, what makes this  summer so different is that the deer are out and about all day. There is one doe with twins. The twins, followed by their mom loped past me, within 30 feet, while I was reading in the hammock just last week. Who knows how often they do when I don't notice them? There is also a doe with one fawn, and a doe without a youngster in tow. What I haven't seen is a buck. They are less bold. A few years ago I was sitting in the garage watching the sun set, when a pair of deer, a doe and young buck started down the drive towards me. When they spied me, they stopped, looked, and then the doe continued on, followed, reluctantly by the buck. Maybe all those generations of being hunted has left its mark more on bucks more than does.

Below is a photo I happen to snap just yesterday afternoon. Wanting to have some photos for this piece, I've been carrying my phone around, as well as having the camera button on my tablet on the home screen. 

Faun on the run, along the retaining wall. Photo taken from the hammock.

As I said, the above photo is one I managed to take yesterday while the fawn ran along the deer track shown above. He or she had just run across the yard going the other way. I hadn't seen the faun until it was too late But then he or she stopped at the end of the lawn, and looked back, stood watching me for half a minute or so, allowing me to get my phone out and its camera up and ready. Then, either to taunt me, or just show off, the fawn ran back. Or simply the exuberance of youth. In any event, it allowed me to get several nice pictures of him or her. Clearly this faun has cut the apron strings of mom.

 These days this happens, this seems, to happen a lot, several times a day. Pretty cool.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.195)

 

THE SATURDAY BOOK REPORT

One more, for now. I'm going to take a break... but unless I read something other that O Douglas, between now and I return to her, you won't have a break.

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.

Penny Plain by O Douglas  B

This is O Douglas' third novel of 1920. In this story we have Jean, age 23 raising her two brothers on her own. The eldest is just going off to Oxford at the start of the story, leaving somewhat younger brother, as well as the son of her step-mother. England at this time sent her sons and their wives off to the East, to India, where they routinely died. I gather that it was customary to send the children of the British Rah, once they reached a certain age, back to England to be raised by relatives or lodged in boarding schools. In this case, Jean and her brothers were sent to an old aunt. When the aunt died, Jean was left to raise her siblings. But that's not all. With Jean's mother dead, her father remarried and had a son. He proceeded to die as well, to be followed by his second wife, who, on her deathbed, set their son back to England for Jean to care for, knowing that Jean was a good and caring person.

They live in small cottage in a fictional Scottish boarder town, probably a fictionalized Peebles. Along comes a daughter of a lord, age 40, who sick of society decides to board in the house next door, and she and Jean become close friends. The story slowly evolves mostly to introduce more characters, though there is a late blooming romance as well, that, in its way, reflected certain attitudes of the day. But I can't go into it without spoiling it, so I won't.

Like her previous novels, a lot of this story is taken up with sketches of the local people and their backstories. A lot of the dialog is, well, kindly gossip about everyone, as well as a description of small town life at that time, which I find interesting. It is somewhat eye-opening to read in books written in the past how much people back before radio, TV, and the internet had to make their own entertainment playing games, singing songs, playacting in ad hoc plays, and calling on, or entertaining, neighbors for tea and such. This is contemporary fiction made historical fiction by the passage of time, and depending on how authentic is was at the time, it becomes authentic historical fiction with time. In the case of O Douglas, I don't think she makes her characters out of nothing. I am sure they are drawn, at least in parts, from people she knew or met, having grown up in Scotland, and went on to live in the very part of Scotland that she's writing about.

As usual with her stories, the characters are all likeable, and even the rather unpleasant ones are not without their good side as well. So far I think the stories of Molly Clavering and D E Stevenson are more novel-like (as they should be) than the three stories O Douglas has written at this point. Douglas is more interested in exploring people than in plot, and indeed, sometimes she even slips herself into the story, mentioning that she's telling the story, rather than having it play out on its own.

I'll be reading on. There are seven more novels in the omnibus, but, as I mentioned in the lede, I'm going to take a break. Maybe I'll read something else, or maybe it'll be just a short break. We'll see.

The Inspiration of the Boring Book

 

A detail from the original artwork from the unrevised cover

Every story starts with a tiny kernel of an idea around which the story slowly grows. Or doesn't. In the case of my newest novel, the boring one, the kernel of the story comes from a jazz standard. More specifically, from two lines of a specific performance of that song.

For some unknown reason, those two lines evoke the wisp of ghost of an untraceable pseudo-memory whenever I hear them sung. Very strange. Strange enough to write a book about. What better subject than a ghost of a pseudo-memory of and unknown time and place?  A past life? Sadly, I don't think I actually got any closer to that time and place. In any event, it inspired a book.

The song is composed by Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was a jazz pianist, composer, lyricist, and arranger in the Duke Ellington band for almost 30 years. The tune is Lush Life, much of which he wrote while still a teenager. The tune is about the failed romance of the song's narrator, who hangs out in "come-what-may places" to get the "feel of life from jazz and cocktails." He falls in love, and for a while, believes her "poignant smile was tinged with the sadness of a great love" for him. Alas, "I guess, ah, yes, I was wrong, again." Heartbroken he muses that a week in Paris might ease the bite of it, though all he cares to do "is to smile in  spite of it." Still, he can't get her out of his mind, so - and then come the two lines that strangely evoke that ghost of a memory of a time and place I can't place - "I'll live a lush life, in some small dive"  Where he'll "rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too."

But it's not just those two lines, but the way they're sung by Johnny Hartman, on the album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. This song, sung by Harman with Coltrane, is that little kernel around which this novel grew. 

You can hear that version of the song HERE

What makes it all so strange, is that when I hear those lines sung, I get a flash of familiarity, not even an image, but a tinge of deja vu, a fleeting memory of knowing this small, dim-lit bar in New York, where a small cadre of regulars, sophisticate men and women gather at night, every night. Stranger still is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've actually been in a bar. Really, I can only think of two times. I'm not a bar person. I'm not very social, I don't drink, save for some cheap wine every once and a while, and I really, really hate loud music and trying to carry on a conversation over it. Plus, I've never been to New York. Not in this life, anyway. It was this inexplicable reaction to those words that intrigued me enough to write a story around it. 

Alas, as I said, I didn't really capture the elusive feeling I was seeking in the story. I ended up writing a story where nothing happens. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. But that became the challenge. Write a story about mundane lives. And having written it, I will publish it, with suitable warnings. I'm actually looking forward to its reception. It's a mystery. Will boring sell? Or be damned? In any event, this fall you'll be able to stop in after ten to meet the habitues of a small Press Borough dive known as the Bleu Moon, just by reading my boring novel, titled Some Small Dive.

Some Small Dive is the third Lorrian novel, set in the Chateau Clare - Glencrow Summer time line, with all new characters, plus a few cameo appearances from a couple of characters from Chateau Clare.

In the next installment, I'll talk about the cover of Some Small Dive. I had actually painted it before I finished the first draft.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.194)

 

THE SATURDAY BOOK REPORT

I warned you.

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 Setons by O Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan) B-

If her first novel, Olivia was semi-autobiographical, this one is as well. Though it has a different main character, Elizabeth Seton, she comes across much like Olivia, with a similar family; the younger sister of three brother in a close-knit family where the children ran rather loose. In this story she is the 28 year old daughter of a Calvinist minister who ministers to a church in the Gorbals of Glasgow, the poor sections of Glasgow. She looks after the house, and her much younger brother as well does all sorts of church work expected of the daughter of a minister, years after the death of her mother and an older brother. Now, consider that the author was the daughter of the Rev John Buchan, a Free Church minister who worked in the Gorbals of Glasgow, who had at least three older brothers, and kept house for her a brother until her father's death after which she lived with her mother. The minister in this story sounds very much like her father, as does the life they lived growing up.

Set in Glasgow, this starts strangely enough, with a chapter about a family preparing a party for their oldest daughter. In it we are introduced to a number of minor characters that will reappear, often briefly, throughout the rest of the book. However, this family is not the Setons, and they too mostly disappear after this opening chapter. The story concerns the everyday doings of Elizabeth as the daughter of a churchman - her duties as such and the people she meets. Long passages are spent describing those people, their Scottish manners and attitude, and a bit of moralizing tossed in. In Olivia, written as a series of letters, these ruminations seemed natural enough, but in this book, they often appear as long speeches or explanations of Scottish life. For me, the story's saving grace is that the Elizabeth is an engaging character - I suspect very much like the author. 

The book's most poignant chapters come at the end. Most of the story takes place in the fall of 1913, but the story goers on... And with all stories set in the real world, there are unavoidable changes. For example,  August 1914 and what the start of World War One wrought to the world. These changes are reflected in its closing chapters, as the male characters go off to war, a war that killed O Douglas' youngest brother in real life. And since this story was written in 1916-17, with the war still raging on, there could be no definite conclusion to fates of many characters in fiction or real life. There were no "happily-ever-after"s in 1917.

Or as she says;

You know, of course, Gentle Reader, that there can be no end to this little chronicle? You know that when a story begins in 1913, 1914 will follow, and that in that year certainty came to an end, plans ceased to come to fruition—that, in fact, the lives of all of us cracked across. Personally, I detest tales that end in the air. I like all the strings gathered up tidily in the last chapter and tied neatly into nuptial knots….

Book Report on My 2026 Reading

A tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 197

Since 2026 is now several weeks more than half over, I thought I'd post a report on what my book reading has been like so far this year. I'm about ten weeks behind in my Saturday Morning book reports, so I may mention some books that I haven't posted yet. And I'm several books behind in the list I am using for this report, but it's close enough.

In the first half of the year I read, or at least started to read, 33 books. I (usually) rate my books on a scale of A, B, C, and DNF. I don't waste my time reading books that would end up with a grade of D or F, so the end up as DNFs. However, I did give a grade of F to one book, for reasons I will mention in a moment. Below are my grades for the books and the number of books in that grade, so far. 

A (4)     12%

B (11)   33%

C (10)   33%

DNF (7) 21%

F (1)       1%

For a total of 26 books completed, roughly one a week, which is my target this year.

I debated about listing the books, but since it would spoil the suspense for several months of Saturday Morning Post reviews, I decided not to. I will post all the books in my end of year summery.

I don't consider this to have been a stellar reading year so far, with only four excellent books. Two thirds of the books I read were either very good/good (B) or good/okay (C). I did not count the various + and - brackets within the letter grades, but still, it is hard to get too excited when most of your books being one degree of mid or another.

All of the DNFs came during the three months I had a Kindle Unlimited subscription, for $.99, and I was trying to make it worth the $.99 I paid for it, and so I was sampling books that I otherwise would not have. Those DNFs might be considered the price of finding good books.

Since my Kindle Unlimited subscription ran out, many of the books I've tried are books brought to my attention on various booktube channels. With these suggestions, I'm still ranging out of familiar reading paths, which again, might explain why my grades are so-so this year. I did find one of my "A" books this year from one such channel, the O Douglas story Olivia.

Kindle Unlimited also serve up the Master Mercurius mysteries by Graham Brack which account for two of the A's and two of the B 's on the list. The other two A's were for that picture book on train paintings, and Olivia.

Another factor in the lack of A grade books this year is that I haven't reread any books from my personal  collection - all of would likely be "A" books. Also, I haven't found that one standout author, like Georgette Heyer, Ellis Peters, or Beth Brower of recent years with lots of books to read.  I've read four O Douglas books, and while they were fine, for what they were, I found them not up to the standard of Olivia.

As for the one book that earned an "F" from me, it did so because it really made me mad. It ended with the line "To Be Continued", without any indication anywhere on the book or in the blurb that it was an incomplete story, or the first book in the series. Even so, it probably would've been a C+ book at best, but you'll have to read all about that in Saturday Morning Post No. 200.

Looking ahead I see more of the same. What I am hoping for is that Beth Brower releases a new Emma M Lion book this year, No. 9. She didn't release a book last year, being too busy traveling, doing research in England, launching the audiobook versions, and landing an UK agent for seeing her books published traditionally in Britain and France, and probably elsewhere. Anyway, once a new book is announced, I'll reread (for the third time) the whole series again.

Other than that, it will probably be sticking to authors I know, often the small domestic stories set in England and Scotland prior to WW2. There are a number of women authors that I could try, and several who I know, and who have plenty of books for me to read - books I'd just have to buy... The problem with liking old and obscure writers.

Another tease The Saturday Morning Post No. 202

Full Circle

 

An early cover idea, with my preferred spelling of "Some Day"

I hadn't realize it when I was writing my latest novel, the boring one, but with it, I've come full circle. My earliest piece of writing currently in print is the short story Kiss of the White Witch. It became, in time, the first piece of Some Day Days, A Romance in an Undetermined Number of Pieces.

I originally wrote it as a short story, sixteen or more years ago, as a response to two short stories I'd read by people my wife knew. Both of those stories were told almost without dialog. I felt they suffered for the lack of it. I felt, and still feel today, that dialog is necessary to give life to the story. So I set out to prove my theory by writing a story that was told almost entirely in dialog. I mean, if a play can tell a story in dialog, why not a plain story... or a novel? After finishing the short story, I felt compelled to write more pieces with its characters, eventually making something of a novel out of it; Some Day Days, Then, as now, I try to use as much dialog as possible to give them, and the characters, something of a life. 

The Kiss of the White Witch is a near future story set over the course of two days, at the end of an Oxford University term. It is an account of mundane events, with the characters telling each other their backstories. Nothing much happens, and indeed, all of Some Day Days is an account of a series of mundane events; a visit to Cambridge, a dinner, an online space game, setting up an apartment... and such. A story that, in the light of expectations as genre fiction, science fiction in this case, nothing happens. Nor does it offer big, far-out ideas to be explored. It's just as mundane a story as any romance or literary fiction story.

That can also be said for my latest novel, the boring one. The parallels only struck me when I started working on the second draft. This new novel also leans heavily on dialog to tell the stories it has to tell. They are all ordinary, everyday stories. Only the fact that the story is set on a world other than Earth makes it somewhat a work of speculative fiction. However, unlike the other stories in this loose series, i never mentions the Age pf Sorcery, and the Second Founding, which were featured in the plots of the previous two novels. And there is no SF-ish reveal at the end, like in the previous two. In short, plots don't get any more mundane than the plot of my new novel.

Of course there other genre books are just as mundane . I'd think most contemporary romances concern themselves with a lot of ordinary events, as does most "Chic Lit", plus, them literary novels. However, the romance in my boring novel is light, it's not aimed at any particular audience, and as a work of literature, it comes with none of the heavy baggage of ideas, themes, and pretentions that literary fiction often features. It's neither fish nor fowl. A work of speculative fiction with no speculative fiction. But too imaginary to be anything else.

Some Day Days is the closest book of mine to this new novel, and though I published it second, it was the first one written in the burst of creativity that led to the writing and publishing my first three books and then on to all the books below. It is my slowest seller, so I don't have great expectations for this new novel, my 20th. Which is just fine. Indeed, that's half the fun of this novel. It's the personal challenge to write a story that not depend on any sort of  mystery, or adventure. A vanilla story. Really, boring is challenging. And boring is the new cool... Isn't it? Or was someone pulling my leg?

Stay tuned for more updates on the boring book coming soon. Work is progressing at a pace. The next entry examines the story's inspiration, and reveals its title!