All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER by Anne Fadiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/28/2003]
I had read Anne Fadiman's EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER a while ago, but immediately afterwards loaned it out to a friend and so couldn't really review it well. But I found another copy cheap (see article above) and so will cover it now.
Anne Fadiman is Clifton Fadiman's daughter, and so grew up in a house of books and learning. They could all be science fiction fans from some of their traits. For example, there is the chapter that begins with them sitting down in a restaurant. Anne's brother says, "They've transposed the 'e' and the 'i' in Madeira sauce." Anne notes, "They've made Bel Paese into one word, and it's lowercase." And their mother adds, "At least they spell better than the place where we had dinner last Tuesday. *They*" serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck." (This may not be representative of all science fiction fans, but proof-reading, spelling, and grammar are major topics in rec.arts.sf.fandom.)
And if you read in my article on acquisitions that what I got for my birthday was a trip to a book warehouse's annual sale, I should add that the idea came from this book, where Fadiman describes her 42nd birthday, when she was "spirited away to a mystery destination," which turned out to be Riverrun Bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, where she ended up with nineteen pounds of used books. (We bought considerably more than that at the warehouse, since the cinema book was over seven pounds by itself, and the Hartwell, the Clarke, and two science books three pounds each. Of course, ours weren't exactly used.)
Fadiman also writes about odd words, strange books, and the other usual topics one finds in this sort of book (i.e., books about books).
To order Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader from amazon.com, click here.
TIME DETECTIVES by Brian Fagan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/08/2006]
TIME DETECTIVES by Brian Fagan (ISBN 0-684-81828-0) is subtitled "How Scientists Use Modern Technology to Unravel the Secrets of the Past". If you like "CSI", you will probably like this book. (It was written in 1996, before "CSI" came on the scene.) Each chapter is about a different archaeological site, and how modern scientific techniques (e.g. isotopic chemistry) were used to find out as much as possible about that site. It is a bit dry and technical at times, but overall makes the sites "come to life."
To order Time Detectives from amazon.com, click here.
GREAT BATTLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD by Garrett S. Fagan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/09/2008]
The Teaching Company course GREAT BATTLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD by Prof. Garrett S. Fagan is a much better course than "Books That Made History; Books That Can Change Your Life" (reviewed in the 08/10/07 issue of the MT VOID). Maybe it is because the subject of the former lends itself to more objective lectures than the latter. GREAT BATTLES is a more difficult course to follow, and Fagan has a much drier and more academic delivery than Frears does. But I also feel I learned more from it. In any case, I am much more satisfied with this course.
There is a slight science fiction connection here, as Fagan talks about counterfactuals (what if Alexander had been killed before he started his conquests?), and even lists the alternate history/counterfactual anthology WHAT IF? edited by Robert Cowley (ISBN-13 978-0-425-17642-9, ISBN-10 0-425-17642-8) in his supplemental reading list. (Conveniently, friends just gave me this for my birthday.) And speaking of reading lists, one problem with this course is that many of the books on the "essential reading lists" given at the end of each lesson summary are available only at college libraries, or in expensive editions, if you want to buy them. (A sampling indicated that if you were lucky, you might find an ex-library edition of some of the books for under $50.) But if you were in a position to get books from a college library, you probably wouldn't be taking this course. At least some are more widely available (e.g., Herodotus and Plutarch).
So as part of listening to this, I've been reading what recommended books I could find. The first was Homer's "Iliad", in specific, the sections about battle. Now, Fagan talked about how the descriptions were an amalgam of the warfare of the time of the Trojan War and the warfare of Homer's time. For example, the social structure and some of the battle techniques are more from Homer's time, but a lot of the Bronze Age armor that Homer described was no longer in use by the time of Homer (who was in the Iron Age). In fact, some of the armor Homer described, although real historically, pre-dated even the time of the Trojan War.
One thing to be noted about Homer is how graphic his descriptions are. For example, "[The] son of Phyleus ... struck him with the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon, and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze blade, and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze." [5.72-75, Richmond Lattimore translation] Or, "Hippolochos sprang away, but Atreides killed him dismounted, cutting away his arms with a sword- stroke, free of the shoulder, and sent him spinning like a log down the battle." [11.145-147]
But Homer also personalizes the battle. He names the killers, but also the killed, in amazing numbers. (One has to marvel at the memories of those who recited this.) But more than naming everyone, he also describes the costs of war: "Diomedes .. went after the two sons of Phainops, Zanthos and Thoon, full grown both, but Phainops was stricken in sorrowful old age nor could breed another son to leave among his possessions. There he killed these two and took away the dear life from them both, leaving to their father lamentation and sorrowful affliction, since he was not to welcome them home from the fighting alive still; and remoter kinsmen shared his possessions." [5.151-158]
And Homer even acknowledges that the battles of his world cannot be like those of the Trojan War. He does not talk about how the gods no longer take a personal hand, but rather that men are different: "A man could not easily hold it, not even if he were very strong, in both hands, of men such as men are now, but he heaving it high threw it...." [12.381-393]
For the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians (701 B.C.E.), the readings were II Kings 18-19, II Chronicles 32, and Isaiah 36-37. Now Chronicles itself is more an expansion of Kings, but the description in Isaiah is in large part word for word the same as that in Kings. This indicates that the writing of one was almost certainly based on the other, and not independent.
In "Infectious Alternatives: The Plague that Saved Jerusalem, 701 B.C." (in the Cowley), William H. McNeill speculates on what might have happened if the Assyrians had taken Jerusalem. But a much better version is Poul Anderson's "In the House of Sorrows" (in Gregory Benford's anthology WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: ALTERNATE EMPIRES, ISBN-13 978-0-743-48729-0, ISBN-10 0-743-48729-X). Anderson sets his story in something probably approximating the present, but in a very different world, where the Assyrians took Jerusalem, and the world's politics, religion, science, and everything else are very different. This is one of my favorite alternate histories, because Anderson did not pick any of the over-used points of divergence from recent history, but instead chose a very important ancient cultural turning point.
When Fagan moves to early Greek battles, the readings include Herodotus's HISTORIES (Books 6-9). In Book 7, Herodotus claims the size of the Persian army Xerxes brought from Asia to Thermopylae was 1,700,000 infantry, 100,000 cavalry (including camels and chariots), and 157,610 naval personnel. Xerxes collected 324,000 more troops as he traveled through Europe. With support staff, the total Herodotus gives for Xerxes's army is 5,283,320. Fagan points out that this is clearly a vast over- estimate--the size of the army Germany used for the WWII invasion of Russia was less than half that. (Xerxes supposedly measured his army by having the 10,000 "Immortals" stand as tightly together as possible. He then drew a line around them, dispersed them, and built a fence on the line. Then he had the troops march into this "corral" in groups of 10,000. For 1,700,000 men, this would have been done 170 times. Assuming that it took even just 15 minutes for each collection, this is over forty hours for the size given of the infantry alone. There is no indication that the measurement might have been done in parallel rather than sequential.)
Herodotus also recounts how a bridge across the Hellespont was destroyed by a storm, and Xerxes "gave orders that the Hellepont should receive three hundred lashes and have a pair of feters thrown into it." Herodotus also claims that he had heard that people were also send to brand the Hellespont with hot irons(!). Fagan described these actions of Xerxes as the "locus classicus of despotic hubris in antiquity"--a lovely phrase.
P. Green's THE GRECO-PERSIAN WARS tries to explain Herodotus's numbers for the various armies and fleets. First, Green suggests that Herodotus confused chiliads and myriads, resulting in a ten- fold increase in troop counts. Green also says that if the number given for the size of the Persian fleet includes all boats used in the bridges across the Hellespont, it is not unreasonable.
The alternate histories really kick in with the battles of Marathon (490 B.C.E.) and Salamis (480 B.C.E.): Lois Tilton's "Pericles the Tyrant" (ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION, Oct/Nov 2005], Harry Turtledove's "Counting Potsherds" (Gregory Benford's WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: ALTERNATIVE EMPIRES), and Victor Davis Hanson's "No Glory that was Greece: The Persians Win at Salamis, 480 B.C." (Cowley). Also, of course Herodotus's HISTORIES (Book 8-9), Plutarch's "Themistocles" and "Aristides", and "The Persians" by Aeschylus.
Turtledove's "Counting Potsherds" is a classic. It takes place in Hellas, with a Persian representative in Hellas trying to discover the name of the king who was defeated by Khsrish four hundred years earlier. His confusion at what he discovers is Turtledove's point, so I will not give it away. Tilton's "Pericles the Tyrant" won the Sidewise Award for Short Form in 2005, so I suppose it's a classic also.
Now I must admit that somewhere around this point, I started to fall behind in my background reading. In addition, I got to a point where most of the works were unavailable to me (except Plutarch, which I had already read). I did read Josiah Ober's "Conquest Denied: The Premature Death of Alexander the Great" and Lewis H. Lapham's "Furor Teutonicus: The Teutoburg Forest, A.D. 9" in Cowley. The latter point of divergence was also the starting point for Kirk Mitchell's "Procurator" trilogy, Robert Silverberg's UP THE LINE, and David Drake and Janet Morris's ARC RIDERS: THE FOURTH ROME.
Okay, this is probably more information than you wanted about ancient battles. But no one was forcing you to read it all.
To order Great Battles of the Ancient World, click here.
To order What If? from amazon.com, click here.
To order What Might Have Been: Alternate Empires from amazon.com, click here.
To order Herodotus's The Histories from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Greco-Persian Wars from amazon.com, click here.
KINDLING by Mike Farren:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/11/2005]
Mike Farren's KINDLING (ISBN 0-765-30656-5) is even worse than John Birmingham's WEAPONS OF CHOICE and Charles Stross's THE FAMILY TRADE for many reasons. First, nowhere on the cover (front or back) does it indicate that it is the first book of a series. Only after the reader has slogged through 416 pages, does she get to read the final words: "TO BE CONTINUED". And amazingly enough, this is priced at $27.95, *above* the theoretical limit. If the book were good, that would be some mitigation, but it isn't. The alternate world Farren describes makes no sense. In it North America was settled primarily by the Norse, and Christianity apparently shares equally with Wicca (although we also have a rabbi), yet we have Jamestown, Virginia, Albany, etc. We also have a plethora (one might even say a surfeit) of recognizable names: Queen Diana (who cared about the poor and did a lot of good works) and her husband King Carlyle (who was self-indulgent, extravagant, and autocratic), General James Dean, Colonel Patton (a woman, but with the same personality as her namesake), Vincent Corleone (head of the United Workers Party), Prime Minister Jack Kennedy, and Jackvance Weaver. And lastly, it's written entirely from a male perspective. True, the four central characters are two males and two females, but while the males are characters with personalities and lives of their own, the females are defined solely by their relationships with men. (And the clincher is the way the sex scenes are written--this book is obviously intended for a male audience.) So it's only part of a badly written, over-priced series. 'Nuff said.
(Again, if you wonder why I am reading all these, it is because I am on a panel judging alternate history works, and am now in catch-up mode on last year's novels. There have been, I should add, multi-volume alternate histories I did like, such as Mary Gentle's "Book of ASH". Not only was it excellently written-- unlike a lot of these--but it was released as a single volume in Britain, and while it was split into four parts in the United States, it was clearly labeled, all four parts came out in the same year, and it came out in mass-market paperback, meaning it cost about what a single hardback would.)
To order Kindling from amazon.com, click here.
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/20/2006]
I always write about the books I finish, so it is probably only fair that once in a while I mention a book I have started but could not finish. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner (ISBN 0-679-73225-X) is one of those. I know it is a classic. I know it is on high school summer reading lists. But I found it uninvolving and, to some extent, unreadable.
To order As I Lay Dying from amazon.com, click here.
AGAINST THE BROTHERHOOD
by Quinn Fawcett:
EMBASSY ROW
by Quinn Fawcett:
THE FLYING SCOTSMAN by Quinn Fawcett:
When you get bored with Sherlock Holmes, there's Mycroft Holmes, in Quinn Fawcett's series. I had to go to Toronto to discover these (in The Sleuth of Baker Street) even though they're published by Tor here in the United States, because I don't really check the mystery sections in the bookstore, and because the first was published as mass-market originals, it didn't show up on the library's new book shelves. The first two, AGAINST THE BROTHERHOOD and EMBASSY ROW, were acceptable, though the recurring premise of an evil brotherhood and a correspondingly good lodge fighting them didn't thrill me, and when I tried the third one, THE FLYING SCOTSMAN, I just couldn't get into it. (In spite of the photo and biography of "Quinn Fawcett" on the book flaps, Quinn Fawcett is a pseudonym for the writing team of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Bill Fawcett.)
To order Against the Brotherhood from amazon.com, click here.
To order Embassy Row from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Flying Scotsman from amazon.com, click here.
IMPROBABLE by Adam Fawer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/11/2006]
IMPROBABLE by Adam Fawer (ISBN 0-06-073677-1) is being marketed as a mainstream thriller, with blurbs by Caleb Carr and Clive Cussler. Do not let that fool you--this is a science fiction novel, and what is more, it is filled with so much nitty-gritty of mathematics (probability) and quantum physics that it might have even qualified for inclusion in ANALOG. David Caine is a man who is capable of calculating probabilities almost instantaneously, which means he almost always wins at games of chance. But the operative word here is "almost", and after a bad bet, Caine finds himself deeply in debt to the Russian Mafia. When he tries to get money by signing up for an experimental treatment for his epilepsy, he finds that his ability has expanded to encompass seeing the results of all the probabilities he calculates. He also finds that he is not the target of not just the Russian Mafia, but also the CIA, North Korean spies, Russian spies, and probably a bunch more people I have forgotten. (I should have used Mark's diagramming method.) People frequently ask on Usenet for examples of mathematical science fiction--well, here is a good one.
To order Improbable from amazon.com, click here.
ZENO AND THE TORTOISE: HOW TO THINK LIKE A PHILOSOPHER by Nicholas Fearn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/11/2005]
ZENO AND THE TORTOISE: HOW TO THINK LIKE A PHILOSOPHER by Nicholas Fearn (ISBN 0-8021-3917-5) consists of brief chapters, each covering a philosopher and his theories (though for some reason Wittengenstein gets two.) The scope is from Thales to Derrida, and covers philosophers often skipped over in introductory books, such as Thales, Francis Bacon, Thomas Reid, Fearn gives a brief biography of the philosopher and a brief summary of the philosophy, with occasional side comments. (Of Nietzsche's "anti-Semitism", he explained that Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic and that Wagner's anti-Semitism was why Nietzsche broke with him. After Nietzsche's death his sister re-edited some of his notes and forged others to support her husband's anti-Semitic views. Fearn says that Nietzsche would have despised the Nazis and their policies.) The one drawback to the book is that it covers only two dozen philosophers, so it misses a lot of the continuity of philosophy. I suppose for someone with no background in philosophy, this might be a good start, but they would still need a more thorough overview to understand how each philosopher builds on what came before.
To order Zeno and the Tortoise from amazon.com, click here.
BOOKS THAT MADE HISTORY; BOOKS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Professor J. Rufus Fears:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/10/2007]
As part of our recent trip to the Canadian Rockies, we listened to "Books That Made History; Books That Can Change Your Life", an audiocourse from The Teaching Company (a.k.a. Great Courses). While looking at great works and how they addressed the themes of God, life, and so on was thought-provoking, I have several problems with this particular course. The lecturer, Professor J. Rufus Fears, is quite irritating at times. First of all, he has a definite Christian agenda and tries to shoe-horn works like "The Iliad" into delivering a basically Christian message, or at least supporting Christian ideals.
Fears also makes annoying slips that did not get corrected, such as saying Desdemona is a senator's wife (rather than a senator's daughter), or that Athena is Kronos's daughter (rather than Zeus's), or that the main character of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is the prototype for its author, Erich Maria Remarque. In his lecture on the Oresteia, he pronounces "Oresteia" as if it were spelled "Orestaia", and "Orestes" as if it were spelled "Oriestes". He also keeps prefixing the definite article to titles. "The Oresteia" is fine, but "The Othello" or "The Prometheus Bound"? And he attempts to quote from the works, but without notes, because he gets some very famous lines wrong.
And lastly, Fears is self-contradictory. He sees Biblical connections everywhere they are convenient, and ignores them otherwise, no matter how obvious they are. In "The Oresteia" he talks about how Agamemnon was told by the gods (whom Fears often refers to as "God" in other lectures) to sacrifice his daughter before sailing to Troy. Fears makes a big point of how Agamemnon did not have to do this; he could have said, "No, this is an immoral act and I will not do it." But he never draws any connection between this and the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, perhaps because it would put Abraham in the wrong. He does something similar later with Pericles, Lincoln, and Remarque: after talking about how Pericles and Lincoln both promote what appears to Fears to be the important virtue of the nobility of dying for one's country to defend its way of life, he then praises Remarque for pointing out that sometimes it is not a virtue. (And he does not even address that the Nazis, whom he is often holding up as bad examples, also were dying for their country to defend its way of life. Should that be considered noble and good?) Fears gives the dichotomy of those who respond to their country's call and those who say, "War is bad; I am a pacifist." He does not acknowledge a third response: "Some wars are just, but this one is not." This ties in with his binary notion that there is such a thing as absolute good and absolute evil. (In fairness, in a later lecture he does talk about just and unjust wars, so perhaps he is just being an agent provocateur at times, but it is quite annoying.)
(He also claims that Lincoln's goal from the beginning was to end slavery. This can best be described as a load of hooey. Lincoln's goal was to preserve the Union.)
And one more minor quibble: Fears keeps referring to previous courses he has done, assuming everyone has heard those as well. ("As we saw in our previous course on the famous Romans, ....")
To order Books That Made History; Books That Can Change Your Life, click here.
DEATH COMES TO PERIGORD by John Ferguson:
John Ferguson's DEATH COMES TO PERIGORD (1931) is set on one of the Channel Islands. Ferguson is Scottish, so this isn't, strictly speaking, an English mystery, but it is interesting that he wrote about the other end of Britain rather than Scotland. This one is notable mostly for the setting, though the mystery/forensic aspect is handled well enough.
To order Death Comes to Perigord from amazon.com, click here.
PRE-REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE FICTION: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Leonard Fetzer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/26/2004]
Leonard Fetzer's PRE-REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE FICTION: AN ANTHOLOGY is an anthology of early Russian science fiction stories. However, I don't know if they're all utopian stories because that's all Russians wrote, or because that's what interested Fetzer. In any case, this is probably only of interest to people interested in that sub-genre, and at a similar level (and style) to Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD.
To order Pre-Revolutionary Science Fiction from amazon.com, click here.
PERFECTLY REASONABLE DEVIATIONS FROM THE BEATEN PATH: THE LETTERS OF RICHARD P. FEYNMAN:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/09/2005]
PERFECTLY REASONABLE DEVIATIONS FROM THE BEATEN PATH: THE LETTERS OF RICHARD P. FEYNMAN (ISBN 0-7382-0636-9) is of minor interest, unless you are doing a lot of research on Feynman. Concentrate instead on his books SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYMAN and WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?
To order Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from amazon.com, click here.
LOST IN A GOOD BOOK by Jasper Fforde:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/23/2003]
Jasper Fforde's second "Thursday Next" novel, LOST IN A GOOD BOOK, finally showed up at the library and while I enjoyed it quite a bit (more than the Swanwick, certainly), it seemed a notch below the first (THE EYRE AFFAIR). Of course, it had to work against the fact that the premise of and the ideas in THE EYRE AFFAIR were fresh and new, while here he must take something we are already familiar with and try to improve it. The punning names seemed more forced, and there was no marvelous set piece like the "Richard III" performance in THE EYRE AFFAIR. Still, if you liked the first book, you'll certainly want to read this. [-ecl]
To order Lost in a Good Book from amazon.com, click here.
SOMETHING ROTTEN by Jasper Fforde:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/08/2004]
Jasper Fforde's SOMETHING ROTTEN (ISBN 0-670-03359-6) is the fourth in the "Thursday Next" series. It's good, but do not start with this one--start with THE EYRE AFFAIR (which my book discussion group is reading in November, so I will undoubtedly be saying something about it then). THE EYRE AFFAIR had a fairly substantial alternate history element, but that was pushed to the back burner by the second book, or indeed, off the stove altogether. Instead, Fforde concentrates on the more literary aspects of his milieu, with the main supporting character here being Hamlet, hiding out in England while the literary detectives try to prevent the hijacking of the play script. I actually think this is an improvement over the previous book, so I'm looking forward to more.
To order Something Rotten from amazon.com, click here.
THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS by Jasper Fforde:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/11/2004]
Jasper Fforde's THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS (ISBN 0-670-03289-1) is another British alternate history, but completely understandable. Well, understandable if you know some basic English literature. The alternate history aspect of the Crimean War et al that was more evident in the first book (THE EYRE AFFAIR) and had been somewhat diminished in the second (LOST IN A GOOD BOOK), has almost entirely vanished here. Instead the Prose Portal and its ramifications have become the center--and a fine center it is. I'm not sure the puns come quite as fast and furious as in the first two books, but I certainly recommend this one. Caveat: read the other two first.
To order The Well of Lost Plots from amazon.com, click here.
THURSDAY NEXT: FIRST AMONG SEQUELS by Jasper Fforde:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/12/2007]
In THURSDAY NEXT: FIRST AMONG SEQUELS (ISBN-13 978-0-670-03871-8, ISBN-10 0-670-03871-7), the fifth in the series that began with THE EYRE AFFAIR, Jasper Fforde is back at the top of his form. He has the usual punning character names (e.g., Cherie Yogert, Cliff Hangar, Harris Tweed), but also more subtle character names, such as Isambard Kingdom Bunuel, "the finest and most surreal book engineer.... When he constructed WAR AND PEACE, no one thought that anything of such scale and grandeur *could* be built, let alone launched...." If you don't get the joke, maybe this book is not for you.)
Fforde also deals with the mechanics of Book World. "Books suffer wear and tear, just the same as hip joints, cars and reputations. For this reason all books have to go into the maintenance bay for a periodic refit, either every thirty years or every million years, whichever comes first. For those books that suffer a high initial readership but then lose it through boredom or insufficient reader intellect, a partial refit may be in order. Salmon Thrusty's intractable masterpiece THE DEMONIC COUPLETS had had its first two chapters rebuilt six times, but the rest is relatively unscathed."
The plot revolves around Thursday attempts to deal with the decline in reading rates, and the attempt to improve them with such devices as interactive reality shows of the classics. The decline is illustrated by Thursday going to Booktastic!, which now has three coffeehouses (one with a branch of itself *inside* itself), DVDs, stationary, gifts, computer games, and a staff that has no idea what a book is:
"I was wondering if you had any books."
"Any *what*?"
"Books. Y'know--about so big and full of words arranged in a specific order to give the effect of reality?"
"You mean DVDs?"
"No, I mean *books*. They're kind of old-fashioned."
"Ah!" she said. "What you mean are *videotapes*."
"No, what I mean are *books*."
We'd exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went into default mode. "You'll have to see the manager."
There's lots more like this, with Fforde taking a good look at just what is causing the drop in reading, and what it might lead to, and how to counteract it. In quality, this *is* "First Among Sequels"--the best in the series since THE EYRE AFFAIR itself. Highly recommended.
(Note: Some people try to purchase all the books in a series they like in matching editions. I have to figure out what edition to buy to maintain my record: I have the other books in the series with no two matching. My copy of THE EYRE AFFAIR is a US Viking hardback, LOST IN A GOOD BOOK is a US Viking trade paperback, THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS is a UK Penguin trade paperback, and SOMETHING ROTTEN is a NEL trade paperback.)
To order Thursday Next: First Among Sequels from amazon.com, click here.
LOST by Joy Fielding:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/19/2003]
Because of the Toronto International Film Festival, about the only thing I've had time to read during the last week or so was Joy Fielding's LOST. And the only reason I read that was because it was set at last year's Toronto International Film Festival.
Fielding gets a lot of the festival stuff right--after all, she's been attending for many years--but she gets a few things wrong as well. For example, the idea of "code words" in the descriptions is spot-on; for example, "lyrical" really means "boring" and "uncompromising" means "hand-held camera". But she also has the protagonist mention seeing three films a day for ten days on a thirty-coupon book. I wish--the first day of the ten-day festival, the films don't start until evening, and one is hard- pressed to manage two films, and day two is not much better.
The story itself concerns the main character's daughter, who vanishes after an audition with a famous director in town for the festival. By three-quarters of the way through, I was sure Fielding had painted herself into a corner, but she does manage to come up with a satisfactory, if peculiar, ending. That's the good news. The bad news is that this book was published only in Canada, so unless you live there or order from there, you'll never see this anyway. But since its main appeal seems to be the festival setting, it's not a major loss. [Actually, it turns out that is no longer true.]
To order Lost from amazon.com, click here.
TIME AND AGAIN by Jack Finney:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/30/2003]
Our library science fiction discussion group just read Jack Finney's TIME AND AGAIN. This is a book about a man who takes part in a time-travel project involving living in a place designed to be just like the destination time and place (think "1900 House" or "Frontier House" or "Manor House"). In this case, Simon Morley lives in an apartment in the Dakota which is exactly as it was in 1882, and so manages to transport himself back to then. The consensus was that Finney was too enamored of the time--the details were at times overwhelming--and that there was really very little science fiction content. I felt if he could have written a straight historical novel set in that time, he would have done that instead.
The back blurbs bear this out, I think. "Would you like to travel back in time to a better, simpler world?" Better or simpler according to whom? Morley gets to run around any hinderance because he's male, and white, and knows about the era. Come to think of it, that's a major problem with most time-travel stories: the protagonist is always so conveniently prepared. I mentioned this last week with FALLAM'S SECRET, but it goes way back. The Connecticut Yankee was certainly knowledgeable about all sorts of technology, but if you went back in time, could you build a forge? And L. Sprague de Camp's hero in LEST DARKNESS FALL just happens to speak Latin. Poul Anderson has been one of the few to treat the topic more realistically (in "The Man Who Came Early"), but as that story shows, you don't get a very exciting tale that way.
(A similar notion, though not dealing with time travel, is to be found in Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's "Mute Inglorious Tam".)
Another blurb (from the "Philadelphia Inquirer") describes TIME AND AGAIN as a "Jules Verne-like fantasy", indicating a complete ignorance of the type of work Verne wrote. (Hint: Verne was very strong on technology and pooh-poohed H. G. Wells's cavorite as too much like magic. What would he have made of thinking oneself back in time?)
This book is not to be confused with BID TIME RETURN by Richard Matheson, which was made into the film SOMEWHERE IN TIME with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, in which someone thinks himself back to the 1890s and falls in love with an actress there. Or with TIME AFTER TIME by Karl Alexander, in which H. G. Wells uses his time machine (!) to chase Jack the Ripper into the then-present. It has a sequel, though, FROM TIME TO TIME.
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DEATH AND THE PLEASANT VOICES by Mary Fitt:
Mary Fitt's DEATH AND THE PLEASANT VOICES (1946) is full of mistaken identities and various wills which may or may not exist, but still seems somewhat mechanical in its plotting.
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REDCOATS' REVENGE by Col. David Fitz-Enz, USA (Ret.):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/27/2009]
REDCOATS' REVENGE by Col. David Fitz-Enz, USA (Ret.) (ISBN-13 978- 1-57488-987-1, ISBN-10 1-574-88987-7) is a novel of the sort I haven't seen since FOR WANT OF A NAIL by Robert Sobel--the fake history textbook. (This doesn't mean there haven't been others, just that I haven't seen them.) There is some dialogue, but on the whole it's clear this is written more as a history book from this alternate world (where the British win the War of 1812) than as a novel. True, it lacks the fake footnotes, bibliography and other accoutrements of Sobel's work, but that may be just as well. These days, if it had all that, people might actually believe it was really true. For that matter, for reasons known only to the publisher, they have decided to give the Dewey Decimal classification as 973.5/2, which is plop in the middle of the American history section, rather than in fiction. (I got my library to ignore the given classification and move it to fiction before some high school kid tried to write a report on the War of 1812 from it.)
Of REDCOATS' REVENGE, Joseph T. Major wrote, "... this is an attempt to provide a serious speculation about a point of departure and its consequences. ... Those who want to read about what if Spartacus had a Piper Cub and the like likely won't be thrilled by this."
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THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/22/2003]
I also read F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY for our library's book discussion group. I can't say it did much for me, even though it's supposedly a classic.
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