The Saturday Morning Post (No. 34)

 

Today's book is another book mentioned in that blog post of James Harris' in which he describes several books 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 like the first book from that post I read, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, it is a story about about science, the times, the role of women in the world, and the world's expectations for them. And once again it is about a woman who defies those expectations. 

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.

My Last 2023 Read

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus   A

This is a very popular book. When I placed a hold on The Signature of All Things at the library, I also intended to place a hold on this book. However, I found that between my place in the line and the number of copies the library owned, I'd be waiting like a year for it, so I didn't bother. However, unknown to me, my wife had placed a hold on it as well some time earlier, and it became available in December. When she mentioned how much she liked the book she was reading I was delighted to discover that it was Lessons in Chemistry and that the library loan was long enough for me to read it as well. So on to the book.

This story is largely set in the early to mid 1950's. The hero of the story is one Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant scientist, and, as it turns out, a brilliant teacher. She was very unfairly denied the opportunity to earn her PhD in chemistry, and as a result, was forced to settle for a much more menial position in a scientific research company; not, however, comfortably so. She knew that she was more brilliant than all but one of the company's employees, but that fact would never be acknowledged simply because she was a woman - a woman who doesn't fit the accepted pattern of womanhood in the society of the era. This was not fair and she fought against that attitude. That is the theme of this book, and it doesn't shy away from saying so, just like its main character, Elizabeth Zott.

As usual, I don't really want to go into the details of the plot, on the off chance that you haven't read this book yet. Suffice to say that the story concerns her finding an oddball, but perfect mate, a failed-at-bomb-detecting, but brilliant dog, and the unconventional raising her extremely brilliant daughter. She finds a way to use her knowledge of chemistry to make a difference in the world in a very different way with her all her chemistry knowledge, along with an attitude. Not in the way she envisioned it, perhaps, but in a wider and more impactful way than just making discoveries in a lab. While the story has many touches of humor, the message is serious and clear; women have the same rights as men to live the life they want to live, and pursue the career they find most rewarding.

The 2024 Novel Cover Reveal

 

I am happy to announce that Passage to Jarpara, the third and final volume of the Tales of the Tropic Sea series is my 2024 novel. Since this is a cover reveal, we'll talk about the cover with only the blurb to describe the story at the end.

About the time I was writing Sailing to Redoubt, I painted half a dozen very impressionistic paintings of the island of Lil Lon, and the harbor of Fey Lon. The goal was to try to make them bright and tropical, without being too concerned about exact details. I used a section from one of the harbor paintings for the first edition, which can still be seen on Goodreads. I've changed the cover several times since then. The last, and present cover uses a painting entitled, Sunrise on Lil Lon. Being lazy, and knowing how iffy my painting is these days, I decided to use its companion piece, Sunset on Lil Lon for this book. I also decided to use the same color for the spine and print boxes as that book, to make the two a matching set (with middle book, The Prisoner of Cimlye, being an outlier). Both these paintings are impressionistic street scenes set on the little island of Lil Lon, but, as I mentioned, my main focus was on nice, bright colors - and lots of them. Do they work, as covers? Who knows? I'm not too concerned about whether covers draw readers or not. I don't think my readers care. Plus, I did have one reader/reviewer say that she was attracted to Sailing to Redoubt by the cover, so that's one win. The one thing I am concerned about is making my covers an expression of my "brand" hence their uniformity in design.

As for the current blurb, here's what I have;

 Taef Lang is on a quest…

… To find a job.

Now a married man, the time has come for Taef to seek his long delayed career as a professor of Island archaeology and/or history. After introducing his new bride to his family, he and Lessie, along with Sella and Carz set sail eastward across the Tropic Sea for the distant Island and University of Jarpara where he hopes to land his dream professorship. 

Passage to Jarpara is a simple travelogue, an account of that journey across the Tropic Sea. It’s a record of islands called on, old friends and acquaintance met, new ones made, as well as potential pirates, curse-beasts, haunted Tiki palaces, fire islands, and a race of immortals they encountered along the way. In short, it is another colorful glimpse of life in the Tropic Sea.

Passage to Jarpara is the third and final volume of Tales of the Tropic Sea, drawing a fitting conclusion to the adventures of Taef, Sella, and Lessie which begun with their voyage to Redoubt Island, and continued with the freeing of the prisoner of Cimlye.

Stay tuned for more details!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 33)

Time for another Cadfael Mystery 

But before that, just a quick note on the paintings I use to identify a book review post as opposed to my regular blog post. I use these to paintings for my book reviews because two of my books are featured in the paintings. The book that appears in the painting above is When Patty Went to College by Jean Webster. Published March 1903. It was my Grandmothers which she had signed in her maiden name meaning that it has been in the family for well over a hundred years. The book featured in the other painting is A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Grosset & Dunlap October 1917 edition which makes it likely over a hundred years old as well. Time flies.

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.

A 2023 Read

Saint Peter's Fair  by Ellis Peters   A

As I believe I have mentioned several times before, I am not a great fan of mysteries, in large part due to the fact that mystery writers seem to always create mysteries about murders. Whether this is due to the laziness of mystery writers or the demands of their audiences I can not say, but it generally annoys me. Especially when they toss in several more murders to cover up the first, as if that ever happens in real life. Or when every fourth person in the village is murdered every other month. All of which is to say that a murder mystery that earns a grade of A from me, must be special. The Cadfael stories are special.

There are several factors that make them special, starting with the writing and the characters. She seem to bring the characters to life with her engaging writing. She gives the reader the wise and worldly monk Cadfael who plays the "detective" along with a number of young, personable, characters, often in trouble whom he helps. Second, is the setting - which includes a map, which is always a big plus for me - but more importantly, the historical setting, which is a turbulent time in England with two claimants, King Stephen and Empress Maud vying for the throne of England. Peters sets her story squarely within that historical era, each story jumping 3 or 4 months ahead over the course of 8 years. I want stories to take me somewhere else, and Peters' 12th century England does that with what seems to me to be authentic detail. They're a fantasy grounded in history. And finally, while there is in each book a murder, or two, or three, they involve events that arrive at the abbey in a turbulent time, and thus, they seem a natural element of the story and the times, not a motheaten convention.

This story involves the yearly fair of St Peter put on by the Abbey of St Peter and Saint Paul. Merchants, customers, and perhaps others, have arrived for the three day fair. The Shrewsbury merchants are unhappy because they must close their shops for the three days, losing business, and the city, worn ragged by the siege of the previous year needs money as well. The prior declines to change the terms of the charter, and a minor riot by the youth of the city results, which apparently leads to the murder of a merchant, for which one of the city lads involved in the incident is suspected of committing. Brother Cadfael, and his friend, the under sheriff believe him to be innocent,. They suspect that the murder was not a simple act of a thief. As in all the books there is element of a whodunit in the story, but with a focus on character and colorful storytelling.

January Writing Update

Today we have the January writing update that I had promised for last week. And just in the nick of time. I'm a mite superstitious, so I don't like announcing birds in the bush, no matter how close my hand is to them. But now, having put an hour's work on a novel nearly everyday since the first of October, I can announce that the bird is in hand. I am, as always, delighted to say that the first draft of my 2024 novel is complete.

While it is only the first draft, it represents a major milestone, since, for me, the first draft accounts for something like 85% of the work involved in the writing of a novel. Filling the empty white page with words is the hard part of writing. Once I have words on the page I can move along much faster. The second draft is all about punching up what I wrote, playing with the words I've written; adding a bit more description here and there, touching up the dialog. I don't usually edit out much. Instead I add the descriptive stuff that I wasn't thinking about when I was writing the scene. Thus my manuscript grows instead of shrinks as it "should" if you listen to the experts. I usually get a second draft done in a month or two. As for the third draft, I read the story on an ebook reader so as to get a feel as to how it reads in "real life", hopefully, only having to tweak a word or sentence here and there. With all that in mind, wind and tide permitting, I hope to release this book by the end of May at the latest.

You may have noticed that so far, I've not mentioned the work's title or what it's about and I don't intend to today. All the cool kid authors make "cover reveals" a big deal these days, and so I'll reveal my cover next week, along with a very brief blurb. Hey, I have this slot to fill each week, so I need to spread this out. But never fear, I always have a lot to say about my books, and I'll be talking more about it over the next month or two.

As for other news, only one of my books, The Secret of the Tzarista Moon has so far been made it as Apple audiobook. I think that I got the voice I wanted. However why that book, and why not more of them have made it into audiobooks? I have no idea. Hopefully I can make an announcement soon that they're all available.

So - drum roll - next week the cover of my 2024 novel and a bit of background on it! Stay turned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 32)

Yes, we have yet another fantasy book to review this week. I can explain. I put my name on the waiting list for the ebook version of this title probably 6 months ago with maybe 30 people ahead of me. I only received it in December 2023. I don't have any more books on the waiting list, so we'll read them as we find them going forward.

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.

Note: a 2023 Read

Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames   DNF 10%

Yet another fantasy book. What gives?

The elevator pitch for this book is that mercenary bands in this world are treaded like rock bands in ours. They have names, star members, and fans. The premise of the story is that we have this mercenary band whose members have been retired for more than a decade and most the most part, have settled down into ordinary lives. However, when the daughter of the former leader of the band, herself a mercenary, is trapped in a city under siege a thousand miles away, her father sets out to save her by seeking out the old band members to get back together again. To reach this besieged city, a thousand miles away, they have to cross the Heart Wyld forest, an place filled with all sorts of monsters and  cross this wild woods and reach the distant city seemingly on foot - in time to reach a city besieged by a large army and do something to save her. Okaaaay....

As you can see from my grade above, the story didn't click with me. I found the premise to be sort of lame, and while the writing sort of snarky, and I found everything else struck me as off the shelf fantasy tropes. Perhaps the most off putting part of the story was the use of swear words. I have nothing against the words, bitch, shithole, fuck, bullshit, etc. Don't mind them at all. No, it's the fact that they are so ordinary, so commonplace, so much of a part of present day life, that they inevitably knock me out of the story and setting and take back into the pressroom break room or college dorm where such words were in common usage. If you are going to create an alternate world, don't be lazy. Invent your curses.

The use of commonplace curses and phrases was symptomatic of the commonplaceness of the prose and setting. Everything encountered in the first 10% of the story I read was nothing that I haven't encountered before. It was fine, but just a generic fantasy setting with generic fantasy characters. Only the premise was cute, though I doubt it really made sense. So, in the end, I found it hard to want to pick the book back up and continue reading. Life is too short, to spend time doing something you really don't want to do, if you don't have to. So DNF. But what do I know? I had to wait six months to read a five year old book, so don't take my word for it, if it sounds interesting to you go for it. It has one sequel, and another on the way.

A Glitch in the Matrix

The Glitch with Static

Last week I may have experienced a glitch in the matrix, at lease in the dream matrix. It went down for a moment.

By way of introduction I should mention that as an old man, I apparently don't need more than 4 or 5 hours of sound sleep a night, and as a consequence I often spend 3 to 5 hours either awake or dozing. I spent these hours thinking about whatever my current writing project is, which is usually boring enough to put me back to sleep. However, being on the borderland of sleep and wakefulness, dreams are sometimes half in sleep and half in (semi) wakefulness. And I was in this borderland one night last week when I experienced the momentary glitch of the matrix. Well, something glitched, anyway.

I was dreaming when suddenly, the "screen" in my dream abruptly, for no reason, when entirely white - with a hiss of static. All I "saw" in my head, in my dream, was whiteness, with a distinct hint of static. This white gap in the dream was so abrupt that it pushed me over the border to wakefulness. It only lasted a second or less before the dream continued on for a bit, but I was awake and consciously aware of it happening, and the strangeness of it happening. I can think of no explanation for it happening, except that something somewhere went "boink" for a second, either in my mind or the matrix. Of that I'm certain. 

I'm not going to seriously propose that there is such a thing as the matrix, or that we are in some simulation, as some scientists propose, that might occasionally go momentarily down. And yet, I find the incident very strange, as I find my dreams. For, you see, my mind is not visual. I can't call up more than a murky approximation of an image in my mind; more like just the knowledge of what it looks like than an actual image. This syndrome is known as aphantasia. The strange thing is that I know that even though I can't recall my dreams in any more detail than the murky images my waking mind can produce, I know that I do see images in my dreams, complicated, full color ones, and my impression is that they can be quite detailed, including the faces of all those strangers I encounter in my dreams... I find this disconnect between my waking mind and my sleeping ones... interesting. And inexplicable. It seems to me that the disconnect between the waking world and the sleeping one for me, at least, is very hard to explain with our current knowledge. I have to believe that we know a lot less about what we think we know than what there is to know. Just say'n.

The writing update promised for today will appear next week, wind and tide permitting.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 31 )

 

What next? How about a review of a fantasy romance novel? A well known one, one with its own TV adoption, so it will be no surprise what book it is to most of you. As you will see below, I don't think that I am the target audience for the book since I'm not female nor am I familiar with the tropes of romance, so that fact will likely color my opinions That said, I do have a lot to say about it. So let's get into 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.

Note: A 2023 Read

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon  C

This is a long book. I had the ebook version of the boxed set of the first four books in the series, and I never seemed to make much headway reading it, no matter how long I read. A percentage point at a time. Thankfully, I only intended on reading the first  book - which came out at a 1000 pages of 5000 pages of the box set, on my fire tablet. I even finished it with a few days to spare on my 14 day loan.

It is a portal fantasy/historical romance largely set in the highlands of Scotland in 1743-44. I did watch the first season of the TV show some years ago It did not  impress me enough to continue on with it. Still, I thought that perhaps the book would be better. It was, until it wasn't. 

Briefly, the story is set after the Second World War. Claire, our narrator and hero, was a nurse in that war and is now on a second honeymoon of sorts with her husband Frank, reunited after the war had separated them. Frank has a great something grandfather, "Black Jack" Randall, who was a British officer in the 1743 timeframe who was stationed in Scotland, and had an iffy reputation that Frank was researching. Frank and Claire observe a modern pagan ritual around a small stone ring, and when Claire returns to collect some plant specimens, she is drawn into its magical powers, and finds herself 200 years in the past, in 1743. 

Right at the beginning she meets Frank's cruel distant relative, Captain Randall. Though he looks a lot like her Frank, she barely escapes being raped by him due to the appearance of some cattle raiding highlanders who save her. Her knowledge of treating wounds and illnesses serves her well as she treats some wounds while she's taken along with them, semi-accepted, semi-prisoner, vaguely suspected of being an English spy. Because she was raised by an archeologist who traveled the world, she was used to the often primitive conditions on sites and so was able to adopt to the primitive conditions she found herself in. Adventure and intrigues follow, with Claire eventually accepting an arranged marriage to make her a Scottish citizen, for reasons that in the end, really don't matter except to serve the romance plot.

The story is well written and told in first person by Claire, It is filled with well developed characters and well researched historical details. (Though, just to be a dick, I'll mention that in one scene she had her characters sitting on a "hay bale". An example of the occasional modern element some time creep into these types of storied. Recall that other book set in the 1920's where the characters looking at a hotel registry were looking a "screen". Details, details details. Not that it matters any.) I like how Gabaldon wrote Claire's backstory so she could realistically fit comfortably into the primitive 1743 setting.

As I guess romances do, it contains a lot of sex scenes with her 1743 husband, Jamie. I don't mind that, though my approach to first person narratives is that the narrator is telling their story to the reader, and well, relating detailed sex scenes would seem a little awkward to me, anyway. But then, this was likely written for women, and only they know what goes when they get to telling stories... I did find one thing that I thought strange, and that was, given all of Claire's candor about sex, she only mentioned her period once, and in passing. This is significant, in that she hoped to find a way to return to the stones in order to get back to Frank, her 1945 husband. That being the case, I would've thought that she'd be paying a great deal of attention to when she could safely make love to Jamie, so as not to return to 1945 pregnant. However, the possibility never seemed to cross her mind, at least for the first several months of her new marriage. While she and Frank had been trying to have a child, without success, as a nurse in 1945, she would  likely know enough about getting pregnant that the failure to do so might not be her fault, and take precautions. But as I said, this was not the case. It just had me wondering... But maybe that's a romance convention. You don't get pregnant unless the plot demands it.

I was ready to give the story a grade of B when I came to this story's natural ending, and a perfect lead to the next book in the series. Unfortunately, this natural ending came half way into the book. Nearly everything that followed was unnecessary for plot and character development. Moreover, the pacing slowed so that the second half of the book really dragged for me. It was mostly spent killing time and almost killing poor Jamie. 

I understand that a lot of stories put  their characters through a great deal of pain and suffering, and maybe that's a trope in romance as well. But in any event, Gabaldon spent many, many pages describing the various cruelties, rape, and illnesses that Jamie had to endure. This was a theme throughout the book. For example, before the story takes place, Jamie had been flogged by Captain Randall nearly to death. This same incident is told in great detail by I believe three different people, including Jamie. The tedious second half of the book begins with a section featuring the domestic life on Jamie's estate, half of which is spent recounting the many times young Jamie had his rear end warmed by the belt of his father when he did something he shouldn't have. Why? And then, later, Jamie is held in prison where he is tortured, and raped by Randall, which once again is recounted in great detail, as well as all the painful things that Claire has to do to patch him up and nurse him back to health afterwards. Clearly all this detail has been included in the book to appeal to its potential readers, since it is unnecessary to advance the plot or build character. It has me wondering if all the blood and suffering is a romance trope as well as a grim dark fantasy trope. Is it romantic for the lass's lad to suffer for her, and for her to tend to his wounds?  Maybe, given the popularity of this series. Once again I'm the odd man out.

So between the slow pacing - Claire spends several pages sneaking through a prison, and many pages describing her treatments of poor Jamie, the torture porn, and the overall extended spinning of wheels in the plot, the second half of this novel gets a D, from me, lowering the total novel a C grade. 

As I said at the beginning, this probably wasn't written for me. It might be for you. I won't be continuing on with it.