All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
BIBIOHOLISM: THE LITERARY ADDICTION by Tom Raabe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/05/2007]
I recently read BIBIOHOLISM: THE LITERARY ADDICTION by Tom Raabe (ISBN 1-55591-080-7). This is more humor book than actual study of the (sometimes extreme) love of books. For example, on page 11 he claims that he once discovered that he had bought three identical sets of Dickens (twenty-one volumes each, hardbound, illustrated, and $185 a set) without realizing the last two were duplicates. And his timeline of the history of the book includes such entries as "Highly publicized diet book published under the title LEVITICUS. Sales flop. 'Too many rules, too depressing, not enough variety, not enough attention to cholesterol,' cry the critics. 'And for crying out loud, give it a decent title.'" Later, he has "LEVITICUS reissued under the title EAT RIGHT OR DIE, but sales still sluggish, limited only to an ethnic corner of the market." But finally, "LEVITICUS reissued as SINAI LITE-- LOW-FAT, LOW-CALORIE, LOW-CHOLESTEROL, LOW-SALT, PORK-FREE EATING FOR PEOPLE ON THE MOVE, by Dr. Moses. Sales take off."
Pages 27 through 30 are the famous "test" that has shown up everywhere (including the Web). Some questions seem serious ("Do you ever buy books simply because they were on sale?"), some not ("When you go to a bookstore after work, thus arriving home late at night, do you lie about where you have been, telling your spouse you were a a bar?"), and some just *wrong* ("At a garage sale, is the first thing you look at the books?" At a garage sale, the *only* thing I look at is the books!).
Raabe gets even the "serious" stuff wrong. He says, for example (on page 63), "Put two copies of the same book on a table, and the uglier of the two will fetch the higher price." I believe he means something like "put a new copy and an older copy of the same book on a table, ..." but a first edition and the current reprint are *not* the same book. (Even Raabe acknowledges this in the next section.) I also think he misspells "Euripides" (as "Euripedes") in his Sophocles/Euripides anecdote in Chapter Eight, but it could be that scholars have decided to revise the transliteration for that as that did for Peking/Beijing. He refers to "Cheryl Ames" rather than "Cherry Ames", but I guess since he's a guy, he can be forgiven--a bit. And in Chapter Ten, "K marts" should be "Kmarts".
(A Google search shows 2,390,000 pages for "Euripides" and 617,000 for "Euripedes".)
Raabe does have a few memorable lines. In talking about fights over volumes in bookstores a hundred years ago, he says, "Today, the only place one experiences this sort of intensity is at the martial arts exhibitions that are euphemistically called 'Friends of the Library' sales."
Several years ago, Mark defined various degrees of science fiction fan: "The first-degree fan reads the Hugo-winning novel even before it was nominated for a Hugo. The second-degree fan read it once it is nominated, but before it wins a Hugo. A third-degree fan reads the Hugo-winning novel after it wins, but before the next year's Hugo nominations. A fourth-degree fan, retroactively named, reads the Hugo-winning novel at some point in the future. A fifth-degree fan has seen THE MATRIX. (It used to be STAR WARS but I am told that today's younger fans have decided that STAR WARS is no good and what rules is THE MATRIX. Only us old fogies still prefer STAR WARS.)" [from a revised version, MT VOID, 04/23/04] Raabe has "The Discovery Index (pages 100-101), which includes various levels such as knowing the author after the author's short stories appeared in a regional literary review but before their novel appeared in hardback, or after the movie tie-in paperback but before the appearance of the movie stars on "Good Morning America".
There is a long chapter on the "fantasy bookstore", but since the book as written in 1991 there is nothing on amazon.com, alibris.com, or any other on-line booksellers. (However, I'm reasonably sure that I was ordering books over the Internet from individual stores in Australia and the Netherlands back then. It just had not caught on in a big way.)
One major problem with this book is that the authors and sources he cites just make one want to go out and acquire those. I'm hoping most will be available from my library system, although books such as CARROUSEL FOR BIBLIOPHILES edited by William Targ and published in 1947 is unlikely to be in any library that has done purging of their shelves lately.
[Which proves what I know. When I started looking up the books in the bibliography, I could not find CARROUSEL FOR BIBLIOPHILES in my library, but one library did have the other book edited by Targ that was listed in the bibliography: BOUILLABAISSE FOR BIBLIOPHILES. Of course, so far as I can tell, the Plainfield Library has never gotten rid of anything--they had close to a dozen of the books in the bibliography that I would have sworn would have long since gone. This is the same library from which I got a 1925 book that I described in a previous column that had one of those old octagonal spine labels with the call number hand-lettered by fountain pen.]
To order Biblioholism from amazon.com, click here.
TIME TWISTERS edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/21/2007]
TIME TWISTERS edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg (ISBN-13 978-0-7564-0405-5, ISBN-10 0-7564-0405-3) is an anthology of seventeen stories, about two-thirds alternate histories, the rest time travel or similar. (Some pretend to be alternate history, but I don't count stories that go right up to the change and then stop as true alternate histories. Nor do I count stories where the change is purely local, such as someone marrying a different person, but no other real change.) As with all too many of these theme anthologies, the stories are mostly uninspired, seemingly written more to write a pre-sold story than from any true inspiration on the part of the author. The only stories than seem to rise above this are Harry Turtledove's "Occupation Duty", Robert E. Vardeman's "The Power and the Glory", and Skip and Penny Williams's "One Rainy Day in Paris".
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PEARL HARBOR IN THE MOVIES by Ed Rampell and Luis J. Reyes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/26/2006]
While we were on vacation in Hawai`i, we bought a copy of PEARL HARBOR IN THE MOVIES by Ed Rampell and Luis J. Reyes (ISBN 1-56647-506-6). The subject matter is of interest, and the authors' opinions on the accuracy and subtexts of the movies worth reading. But the research and (again) the proofreading is so bad . . . (and the publisher, while not a major, is not a vanity press either).
For example, the book does not mention at all the Takei "Twilight Zone" ("The Encounter"), but does include such peripheral films as RADIO DAYS. They use the term "AJAs" without defining it (I eventually realized it stood for "Americans of Japanese Ancestry"). It has awkward juxtaposition of sentences, which sometimes make no sense at all. Of the filming of WACKIEST SHIP IN THE ARMY, they say, "Filmed mostly on location on Kaua`i, the company then moved to Pearl Harbor for some location scenes, to find the harbor full of the necessary Navy craft. The fleet, which had been there the entire company was on Kauai [sic], had sailed out the night before they arrived in Pearl Harbor." [page 92] Are they saying that the fleet had been in Pearl Harbor, but left the night before the film crew arrived? But then the harbor would not have been full of Navy craft. Are they saying the fleet had been in Kaua`i, but had sailed to Pearl Harbor? But there is no place at Kaua`i for the fleet to be.
They write "American Movies Classic" [pg. xxi] or "American Movies Classics" [pg. 2], when the correct name is "American Movie Classics". They fail to capitalize "Nazi" [pg. 3]. And a particularly irritating gaffe is that the list of video sources at the end is missing all titles starting with 'J' through 'L'.
On page 51, Rampell and Reyes say, "Twenty-plus years after PEARL, there is no Holly Nagata." But it is not until page 103 that one reads about the mini-series PEARL and its character Holly Nagata, meaning one is completely baffled by this sentence for fifty pages.
You can tell this book was written pre-9/11. Rampell and Reyes talk about Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy's assassination as defining moments, and then says, "Perhaps succeeding generations mark their life calendars by the untimely death of rock stars like Elvis or John Lennon. Or might the events be the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the O. J. Simpson trial or the turn of the century? The immediacy and rapture of a nation gripped in a sense of loss by life-changing events has not happened in several generations." Well, now we know what at least one generation will use to mark their life calendars.
Even with my reservations about the book, however, it is the only source I know of on the subject, and Rampell and Reyes's analyses of the accuracy of the films, and of social attitudes shown in and by the films, makes it worthwhile for those interested in those aspects.
To order Pearl Harbor in the Movies from amazon.com, click here.
CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA: WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN by Roger L. Ransom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/24/2006]
CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA: WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN by Roger L. Ransom (ISBN 0-393-05967-7) is a counterfactual. It is not an alternate history per se, because first of all, it is not a novel--there are no characters, and no plot outside of recounting the history as it might have been. And second, Ransom never gets into the world of the divergence. Alternate history novels are always written *in* that world, unless the main character is from our timeline (or some third timeline). Even Robert Sobel's classic FOR WANT OF A NAIL, while not a novel, is written *in* its timeline, down to alternate bibliographical and publication information. But Ransom keeps pulling back, saying things like, "In our world what happened was X. But what if Y?" It is of interest to history buffs, but does not have the texture to appeal to most people looking for an alternate history novel.
To order Confederate States of America from amazon.com, click here.
CRIMINAL KABALLAH by Lawrence W. Raphael:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/24/2004]
CRIMINAL KABALLAH edited by Lawrence W. Raphael (ISBN 1-58023-109- 8) is the follow-up to his MYSTERY MIDRASH (reviewed in the 09/17/2004 issue). This was not quite as good an anthology, but that was in part because several stories were not mysteries but just stories about crimes or wrong-doing. (It's the problem with the Sherlock Holmes story "The Veiled Lodger"--there is no detection involved.) Not a total miss, but not up to the first.
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MYSTERY MIDRASH by Lawrence W. Raphael:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
Lawrence W. Raphael's MYSTERY MIDRASH (ISBN 1-58023-055-5) is a collection of Jewish mystery stories. It is not just that the characters happen to be Jewish, but also that there is some aspect of Jewish law, or some story from the Jewish written or oral tradition that ties in, or some other more substantive connection. I enjoyed them, but as with the "cat mystery" of a few weeks ago, these seem aimed at a fairly specialized audience. And the not everything was fact-checked. For example, one author makes a reference to "Lee's strategy at Vicksburg." Lee was not at Vicksburg; he was a thousand miles away at Gettysburg at that time. Another author claims there are three laws one may not violate even to save one's own life, and that Sabbath observance is one of them. Actually, it's not.
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THE JOYS OF READING: LIFE'S GREATEST PLEASURE by Burton Rascoe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/01/2008]
Reading old books about books is enlightening. One discovers that authors were considered great and lasting in 1937 are completely forgotten now, and one is perhaps reminded that many authors currently in favor may fade from view in another few decades. THE JOYS OF READING: LIFE'S GREATEST PLEASURE by Burton Rascoe (copyright 1937, and of course there is no ISBN) has chapters on "The Joys of Reading" and "How to Judge Literary Values," but it also has lists. The list of twenty-five favorite authors from 1900 to 1925 includes many that have withstood the tes of time: H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and Jack London. But it also includes Joseph Hergesheimer, Gamaliel Bradford, May Sinclair, and W. J. Locke, and omits (for example) Arthur Conan Doyle. A list of the twenty-five favorite books lists two by Wells: THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY and MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH. Admittedly, his classic science fiction novels were written before 1900, but this century still saw THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, THE FOOD OF THE GODS, and IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET.
To order The Joys of Reading from amazon.com, click here.
GAY MARRIAGE by Jonathan Rauch:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/04/2004]
Jonathan Rauch's GAY MARRIAGE (ISBN 0-805-07633-6) seems to have been rushed into print following the Massachusetts Supreme Court's ruling last November on same-sex marriage. Rauch gives his arguments as to why gay marriage is a good thing, and why the arguments against it fail. Well, actually, he explains why the arguments against it are contradictory and inconsistent. One example: one argument is that marriage is about procreation and raising children. Yet Rauch notes that laws don't void mixed-sex marriages that fail to produce children, or after the children have left home--in fact, several states allow certain marriages (such as first cousins) *only if* the couple can not produce children! And, as he notes, when two octogenarians wed, the reaction is usually, "Isn't that romantic!" rather than "How dare they attack traditional marriage!" I won't cover all his points, but will note that a basic one is that those who support ABM ("Anything But Marriage") in the form of civil unions, are actually doing more to destroy marriage than those who support gay marriage. How? By providing options for couples other than marriage, and saying that these other options are just as good, these people are telling mixed-sex couples that they don't need to marry either--that there is nothing special about marriage, and that there is really no reason to marry rather than to cohabit. I somehow doubt that this is what those people really want.
(When the two octogenarians are of the same sex, one sees some people have very conflicted opinions. I know this, because my uncle recently married his partner of sixty years in Canada--and they're both in their 80s. People were truly torn between "romantic" and "unheard of.")
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A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2009]
Last week in my review of ORLANDO I wrote about "a philosophical theory proposed in the 20th century--justice is what you would arrange for a society if you were responsible for setting it up *before* you knew what your position would be in it." Well, I just ran across a reference to it that had all the information about it I couldn't remember. It was proposed by John Rawls in his book A THEORY OF JUSTICE (ISBN-13 978-0-674-01772-6, ISBN-10 0-674-01772-2), which I have not read. However, as I understand it, he hypothesizes a system whereby we all decide before being born what kind of society we want to be born into. "Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their concepts of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."
There are, of course, a couple of problems with this. One (pointed out in the work where I read this) was that Rawls assumes people would be risk-adverse, thereby choosing a much more egalitarian society, while in reality they might be willing to accept a 3- billion-to-1 chance of ending up in a very negative situation. (Think of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".) A bigger problem, I think, is that it merely pushes back the problem one level. How does the "pre-society" collective decide on the world to be created? Rawls seems to assume that the best (only?) approach here is a straightforward vote. While that may seem intuitive to people used to voting on things, surely somewhere someone will suggest that perhaps the choice would be better made by some other method, e.g., list all the possibilities, then pray for a sign by God.
Another, more mathematical difficulty, is that Rawls assumes people are more logical than may be the case. Given a society in which either everyone gets $2000 or some get $50,000 and some get $3,000, he assumes people would pick the latter, while it seems quite possible they would choose the former.
To order A Theory of Justice from amazon.com, click here.
"Hexagons" by Robert Reed:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
"Hexagons" by Robert Reed is an alternate history set in "New Rome" and suffers only from having too much of a similarity to our own world in setting and in some of the characters. (Robert Silverberg gets this right in his "Roma Eterna" stories, by the way.) This is probably why "Hexagons" didn't make the short list of finalists for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, but I still like it quite a bit.
BLOOD ON THE SADDLE by Rafael Reig (translated by Paul Hammond):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/15/2007]
BLOOD ON THE SADDLE by Rafael Reig (translated by Paul Hammond) (ISBN-10 1-852-42870-8, ISBN-13 978-1-852-42870-9) is a hard- boiled detective novel set in a near-future Madrid. Actually, it is even more specifically a Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe) pastiche. (One of the missing persons the detective is looking for is a character from a novel, so there may be a dash of Jasper Fforde here as well.) I'm not sure the genre feeling survives the transition in both time (from the 1940s and 1950s to the 21st century) and space (from Los Angeles to Madrid). And having to further be interpreted into Spanish by Reig and then translated back into English (by Hammond) may be more stress than this very stylistic genre can bear.
This is not to say that the book does not have its moments. On listening to some literary critics, our narrator Carlos Clot says, "These were penitential readers. The value they attributed to a book was in direct proportion to the effort it had cost them to finish it." (page 102)
Because this was translated for British publication, Britishisms such as suspenders (for garters) and Inland Revenue and British spellings occur throughout. This seems very odd in a book that is clearly a Raymond Chandler pastiche. One quibble: Walter Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk", which the character Penuelas dismisses as "a work about shopping arcades . . . a work without too much interest, not to say a pure clinker" (pg. 89) is actually much more than that and is considered a major work in 20th Century studies. [-ecl]
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BLOOD LINES by Ruth Rendell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2004]
Ruth Rendell's BLOOD LINES (ISBN 0-517-70323-8) is a collection of mystery short stories in a style similar to Patricia Highsmith, though not nearly as edgy and unsettling. The result is that I can actually *read* these stories, and I recommend them. I have not read any of Rendell's novels, but she has several other collections out as well, and she also writes under the name of Barbara Vine.
To order Blood Lines from amazon.com, click here.
Collected Stories by Ruth Rendell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/07/2005]
Ruth Rendell's COLLECTED STORIES (ISBN 0-345-35995-X) is an omnibus of four earlier collections: THE FALLEN CURTAIN, MEANS OF EVIL, THE FEVER TREE, and THE NEW GIRL FRIEND. MEANS OF EVIL is a collection of Inspector Wexford stories; I earlier reviewed one of Rendell's Inspector Wexford noels, BLOOD LINES (in the 08/13/04 issue). The rest are stories which involve crimes, but they are not necessarily mystery stories per se. They seem to be part of a sub-genre that encompasses John Collier and Jeffrey Archer-- stories with a "twist". They are also reminiscent in tone to the works of Patricia Highsmith, though not quite as creepy. (I find it interesting that even though it contains two Edgar-winning stories, this is mentioned only in the back blurb, not on the front cover. Apparently the only genre award that publishers think worth trumpeting on the front cover is the Hugo.)
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THE MAN WHO FOUND TIME: JAMES HUTTON AND THE ANTIQUITY OF THE EARTH by Jack Repcheck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/09/2004]
And I'll briefly mention Jack Repcheck's THE MAN WHO FOUND TIME: JAMES HUTTON AND THE ANTIQUITY OF THE EARTH as being of interest to those interested in the history of science, and in particular in its interaction with religion.
To order The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Antiquity of the Earth from amazon.com, click here.