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!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 193)

 

Today we have another booktuber recommendation, this time from a newly discovered booktuber. She talked about a number of English women authors from the turn of the last century to its mid-point. Writers the like of Miss Read, D E Stevenson, and Molly Clavering, all of whom I have read and enjoyed. 

However, this time around, we have a new such author. How will she stack up? 

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.

Olivia (AKA Olivia in India)  by O Douglas  A  

This book was just what I was looking for. Indeed, I had been exploring my options both from the library and on Kindle to find some new British women authors' fiction, which includes some of my favorite authors, and whose work I haven't exhausted. And so when I came across a video talking about ten such authors. So here we are.

This is an account of several months Olivia Douglas spends visiting her government official brother during the Indian cool season. It is written as a series of letters to a good friend/lover back in England. It recounts the voyage, the people she meets, the sights she sees, and the experience of India from the point of view of an British woman prior to World War One, i.e. it is mostly a view of the thin veneer of English rule over the vast subcontinent. 

I've now read a number of stories set broadly in this period, and find them fascinating for some reason. So much so that I am considering trying to capture whatever it is about India under the  British Rah in a speculative fiction novel. No promises, just thinking. In this account, as I said, she talks mostly about the people she meets as she travels across India along with her brother. This is not a story about the Indian people, rather it is of the English living and ruling India.

O Douglas is the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, who is the younger sister of John Buchan of The 39 Steps fame, an old favorite author of mine, and it is based on a trip she made to India to visit one of her other Buchan brother, so it is probably an edited version of her actual experiences in India, an authentic account of the slice of life she chose to describe.

She is best membered, if she is at all for a series of domestic focused novels set in the Peeblesshire in the low lands of Scotland. I came across her on Jen's Reading Life YouTube channel in a video featuring ten British women authors prior to the 1950's, which, as I mentioned in the lede, included old favorites like Miss Reed, Molly Cavering, and D E Stevenson, as well as several others that I've read. And it just so happens that a ten novel collection of O Douglas's novels was available on Amazon, and on sale as well. So for the princely price of $.99 I have ten of her novels to explore. I hope that they will prove as interesting in their own way as this rather exotic account did. She can write... and that's more than half the battle for me. You can expect to see more book reports on O Douglas's novel in the future. Hopefully, for months in the future. I have nine left to read.

The Treasure Cave

 

The Door to the Treasure

Actually, it's more like a closet. And it will take some work, a death, and a lot of luck to make what it contains into a treasure, but it makes for a nice click-bate headline.

I've been drawing and painting all my life. Prior to 1992 I painted in watercolors, using old photographs from old picture books as references. But I realized that if I ever wanted to sell my work, I'd need to make it entirely my own work. So in 1992 I started on an imaginary journey through an imaginary land as a vagabond plein air painter, painting scenes  that I found interesting traveling the highways and byways of Cealanda. By 2003 I had painted hundreds of paintings, and with the handwriting on the wall stating that I would likely be unemployed anyway, (A large newspaper chain had bought the small daily newspaper and were hiring graphic artists that did need me to do their photoshop work) I decided to try my hand as a professional artist. Over the next five years I painted hundreds more paintings in oil and acrylic. I sold several hundred. Never for much, but that's the lot of artists. And even after I decided not to continue to pursue a commercial market, I continued to paint, for the fun of it, as I always have.

Maybe ten years ago I ran out of ideas I cared to paint, and my painting dwindled to a trickle. I almost always painted imaginary scenes, when I ran out of imaginary scenes I cared to paint I had nothing to paiting. But it didn't matter much, as I had my writing to fill the void. Writing is another thing I've done all my life.

I'm trying to get back into these days - by painting very small paintings that I can complete in an hour or two, i.e. the limit of my patience. With my  treasure cove, I don't need any more paintings because...

I still have all the paintings I didn't sell. Which was most of them. I have them stored in a closet under the stairs. Recently, after trying to select some summer paintings to put on the wall, I decided I needed real rack to hold all of them to make them easy to find and pull out. I bought one. Straightened up the closet to make it nice and neat so I and my heirs can get at the paintings easily. 

Today, I'll take you on a brief tour of that closet, so you can see the wages of not matching production with demand....

The photo above is the door to the art closet. To reach it, one must make it past the game shelves on one hand and the 2025-26 winter collection of jigsaw puzzles.

Opening the closet door we are met with two bookshelves.  Like all my bookshelves, they are actually salvaged plywood boxes that once contained printing plates - the perk of spending five years as the third shift platemaker. On the shelves most of my smaller paintings are filed standing. I have them in cellophane sleeves, two paintings to a sleeve. Most of them are 12X16" acrylic paintings on hardboard, though you can see there are several different sizes and some of them are small oil paintings. 

The plastic bag below them contain stretcher bars for the stretched canvas oil paintings that I dismantled when it came time to move seven years ago.

Below, we have  stepped into the closet and rounded the corner to look under the stairs. We have those stretcher bars, and behind them, some stretched canvas paintings, some large canvas boards, along with a couple of portfolios and a pad of watercolor canvas.

In the phot below, we have stepped further in and are now looking at my new shelves located under the steps. On the the lowest shelf are some of my standard 18x24" acrylic on hardboard paintings. I've divided  them into two groups to make it easier to sort through them. Like the smaller paintings, they are in cellophane sleeves, two to a sleeve. The second shelf up contains more 18x24" paintings as well as 16x24" ones. Hardboard comes in 48x24" sheets, so I can cut it to get either 3 16x24" or 2 18x24" boards for paintings with one 12x24" one. The 18x24" painting fit nicely into 24x30" frames with 3" mattings making them my preferred size. You don't need to frame acrylic paintings under glass, but I do, because a 24x30" frame makes them appear bigger on the wall.

Below, we take just a further step under the stairs to see where all my oil paintings are stored. They were painted on stretched canvas. You can see some of those standing against the wall on the left - stretched canvas that I bought. Later on, I bought my own roll of canvas and the stretcher bars and made my own stretched canvases to paint on. These I could disassemble, unlike the ones I bought and did to make moving them easier, and safer. All those oil paintings are stored flat in the blue box and plywood boxes beyond the shelving.

Below. The seven boxes on the top of the shelf, contain the hundreds of watercolor and thin acrylic paintings I did before turning professional, and after I did. I quickly discovered that watercolor paintings don't command a great deal of money, so I had to switch to oil and than acrylic paints. Which I hated, until I didn't anymore.

I've not inventoried the paintings I have on hand. Once I started selling them, I numbered them as I went along. My records show that I painted 282 oil paintings of various sizes, and 25 watercolor paintings ibn that period. I haven't counted all the watercolors I painted prior to 2003. I also painted 55 small, 5x7" "bookshelf" acrylic paintings, and 1,207 acrylic paintings up until 2015 or so when I mostly stopped painting and counting the ones I did. All of which is a total of 1,569 paintings that I have kept records for. I sold something like 300 of them. I haven't bothered to record paintings since then, and I don't know how many watercolors I did in the eleven years between 1912 and 2003, but they fill those seven big flat film boxes on the top shelf, likely 300-400+. Bottom line, I have a lot of paintings, to choose from when I change them out every season.  

The Summer Collection