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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 14, 2023 10:32:03 GMT -5
The Strange Case of the Alchemists Daughter
Theodora Goss
I grabbed this to read for the Goodeads Hugo/Nebula book club, but have deifnitely also seen it somewhere before. I realized after entering my review it was here, as Slam read it a while back.
It's a bit odd it was nominated for a sci-fi award, not because it's not a good book, but because it's a Sherlock Holmes patische, which also creates 'the Athena Club', whom surely are the subject of future books. They are a sort of a YA girl version of the League of Extraordinary Gentelmen.. daughters of a variety of literary Victorian scientists that (almost) all have some sort of special powers.
Goss writes an excellent Holmes... her characterization seems most like the Benedict Cumberbach version, but a nicer, more gentlemanly one (I guess to fit in with his having to interact regularly with a group of single young women, even if they are.. unusual).
The book gives us a decidedly different take on the Whitechapel Murders (which is the case being solved here), one which fits grandly into the Victorian lit theme of the book. The characters are a bit too successful against the bad guys for my taste, and Watson (who is clearly extraneous to the story when you're creating your own Holmes assistance) is the only casualty (and a minor wound at that), but it works for the story.
One note on the style, the author writes the story as if the main characters are writing it, and at various points she steps out of the story to show them arguing/bickering/commenting on it. I can see why, it definitely added to the characterizations, but it lead to a bit of self-spoiling in the story and definitely takes one out of the narrative, overal I could have done without them.
I am far from a Victorian lit expert (I had to look up who Rappachini was) But I certainly know the obvious ones.. I suspect a few of the the background character would probably jump out at others more versed in the era.
Definitely a good book overall, I suspect the sequel(s) may leave Holmes out, which is a shame, but might be worth reading at some point anyway.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 14, 2023 11:55:40 GMT -5
The Strange Case of the Alchemists Daughter Theodora Goss I grabbed this to read for the Goodeads Hugo/Nebula book club, but have deifnitely also seen it somewhere before. I realized after entering my review it was here, as Slam read it a while back. I liked this a fair bit, though it's been almost three years since I read it. The sequel, however, I gave up on and didn't finish (which is pretty rare for me). It was just glacially slow and cumbersome. I'm pretty sure that a good editor could have excised at least 200 pages of its 720 page weight and nobody would have missed them. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 14, 2023 16:28:08 GMT -5
 A Fine Dark Line by Joe R. LansdaleStanley Mitchell is a 13 year old boy who lives in Dumont, Texas in 1958 with his parents, who own the only drive-in theater in town and his older sister with whom he mostly bickers. Stanley is new in town and is kind of a nerdy kid so he mostly hangs out by himself and with a badly abused boy of his age. It's a boring normal kid life until Stanley finds a locked metal box near his family's drive-in on the site of an large house that had burned down years before. The letters in the box lead Stanley to find out about the murder of two girls in the town years before. With the aid of Buster Smith, the aged black projectionist at the drive-in, who may have been a police officer in Indian Territory years before, and a bit of help from his sister, Stanley dives in to the mystery of who killed the two girls. Lansdale is excellent at every genre he sets his mind to writing in. He made his bones as a horror writer. And probably made his fame with Hap & Leonard, which are nominally mystery novels. But I think he may excel the most at historical fiction. This isn't quite on par with The Bottoms or The Thicket. But it's close. It's a great little coming-of-age/historical novel with a little bit of a mystery and maybe just a bit of a horror jump-scare here and there. Lansdale usually shines. And he does here again. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 18, 2023 13:03:37 GMT -5
 Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties by Michael Eury
Michael Eury gives the Twomorrows treatment to the comics, TV shows, and ephemera of the Camp Era (the mid to late 60s). If you've read any of the books put out by Twomorrows you know what you're getting. That's particularly unsurprising since Eury is the editor of Back Issue Magazine, which happens to cover the comics I grew up on (the 70s and 80s and recently into the early 90s). Most of this stuff was from before my time, me being a 1967 model. But there was plenty of crossover, particularly since I had two older brothers and an older sister who were right in the middle of this stuff (Eury was born smack in between my two brothers). So I cut my teeth on reruns of the Batman TV show, Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward cartoon reruns, The Monkees, etc. And it wasn't super unusual to come across some old comics from this era in the mid 70s and a number of the Big-Little Books of this era were reprinted in my youth. Probably not as meaningful for me as if I was 8 or so years older, but still a fun and informative nostalgia trip. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 18, 2023 14:51:06 GMT -5
Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties by Michael Eury
Michael Eury gives the Twomorrows treatment to the comics, TV shows, and ephemera of the Camp Era (the mid to late 60s). If you've read any of the books put out by Twomorrows you know what you're getting. That's particularly unsurprising since Eury is the editor of Back Issue Magazine, which happens to cover the comics I grew up on (the 70s and 80s and recently into the early 90s). Most of this stuff was from before my time, me being a 1967 model. But there was plenty of crossover, particularly since I had two older brothers and an older sister who were right in the middle of this stuff (Eury was born smack in between my two brothers). So I cut my teeth on reruns of the Batman TV show, Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward cartoon reruns, The Monkees, etc. And it wasn't super unusual to come across some old comics from this era in the mid 70s and a number of the Big-Little Books of this era were reprinted in my youth. Probably not as meaningful for me as if I was 8 or so years older, but still a fun and informative nostalgia trip. I can’t afford any more TwoMorrows books for a while as I’ve just bought Our Artists at War and Old Gods & New: A Companion To Jack Kirby's Fourth World. But that book is most definitely the next one on my list. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 18, 2023 14:54:52 GMT -5
Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties by Michael Eury
Michael Eury gives the Twomorrows treatment to the comics, TV shows, and ephemera of the Camp Era (the mid to late 60s). If you've read any of the books put out by Twomorrows you know what you're getting. That's particularly unsurprising since Eury is the editor of Back Issue Magazine, which happens to cover the comics I grew up on (the 70s and 80s and recently into the early 90s). Most of this stuff was from before my time, me being a 1967 model. But there was plenty of crossover, particularly since I had two older brothers and an older sister who were right in the middle of this stuff (Eury was born smack in between my two brothers). So I cut my teeth on reruns of the Batman TV show, Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward cartoon reruns, The Monkees, etc. And it wasn't super unusual to come across some old comics from this era in the mid 70s and a number of the Big-Little Books of this era were reprinted in my youth. Probably not as meaningful for me as if I was 8 or so years older, but still a fun and informative nostalgia trip. I can’t afford any more TwoMorrows books for a while as I’ve just bought Our Artists at War and Old Gods & New: A Companion To Jack Kirby's Fourth World. But that book is most definitely the next one on my list. I picked this one up on one of their sales so it was pretty cheap. I will definitely get around to the War book at some point. I’m not a big fan of The New Gods, so that’s way down the list. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 21, 2023 9:48:36 GMT -5
In a Garden Burning Gold
by Rory Power
I ended up reading this through our library's 'Blind Date with a Book' event they do every year... they take a bunch of books and wrap them, then list the general genre of the book and a quote from in on the outside. Last year, I ended up with an 'ex' (I had already read the book I picked), but not so this time. This book was labeled 'Mythology' and 'Folklore', I can't recall the quote, but it was interesting enough for me to grab it.
Rather than Mythology, though, it's really more a pale imitation of Game of Thrones. Yes, the rules have some powers, but they are more ritual than of any practical use. The story seems like it's going to use multiple points of view, but really there are just two.. the two main characters (who are twins).
Both of them have their own political finagling going on, both against their father for good reasons, and unknowlingly against each other. The sister, Rhea, has the power over the seasons, she gets married every season and kills her consort to change them. Yet somehow people still volunteer (for the promise of a good harvest, I guess? it's not clear) and Rhea is still somehow not either an evil monster or completely devoid of feeling, which one would expect after killing a spouse every 3 months for a hundred years.. as the 'powers' they have also make them immortal, at least until someone kills them (which seems to happen often).
The brother, Lexos, puts the constellations in the sky and sets the tides in motion, and is the 'second' to their father... he does a variety of things to help the family hold on to power with varying degrees of success.
Then at the end a whole lot of random stuff happens out of the blue, yet everyone else seems to have prepared for it except our point of view characters.
A good attempt, but just far too much time on descriptions and inner monologues and not enough time establishing more of the world we're suppose to care about.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 22, 2023 14:12:39 GMT -5
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter MosleyThis is a re-read, but it's been at least 25 years since I've read the book. So I remembered the very broad strokes and the reveal, but not a lot else. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has just been fired from a factory job. He's young, a World War II veteran and is buying a house. That would be problem enough for how he's going to make his mortgage. But he's also black. And in Los Angeles in that means his ability to come up with the mortgage is incredibly limited. But his friend Joppy has an opportunity for him. He's hired by Dewitt Albright, a white private investigator, to look for a white girl named Daphne Monet who has gone missing and is known to frequent establishments in Watts, a black neighborhood in L.A. There's far more here than meets the eye and it goes in to much higher echelons of the L.A. establishment than Easy could ever have thought. And Easy, while intelligent and resourceful, is very much an amateur investigator which causes him a number of issues. This is a very traditional P.I. novel and Mosley hits most of the classic tropes. Which isn't inherently a bad thing because Easy being black and being in L.A. in 1948 gives Mosley the ability to stand many of them on their head. Of course there's the femme fatale in the person of Daphne. And there are plenty of villains to go around. Really it's the combination of the setting within the setting (Watts in L.A.), the time-frame, and the voice that Mosley gives to the black characters that make this so different and such a stand-out. My biggest complaint would be what I have dubbed as deus ex Mousechina. Pretty much every time that Easy gets in to a situation from which there is no escape...enter Mouse, Easy's psychotic friend from Houston to save his arse. It becomes just a bit too much. Still this is a very good book and a great first novel. It's also a ground-breaking novel. Before Easy there had been almost no black P.I.'s in literature. Maybe none at all. Chester Himes' Grave-Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, were NYPD detectives. I guess there was Shaft, but Ernest Tidyman was certainly white and I 've not read the books so I can't speak to the authenticity of the voice. Walter Mosley opened the floodgates with Easy Rawlins. And he did it in a very big and entertaining way. |
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Post by berkley on Feb 22, 2023 14:38:22 GMT -5
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter MosleyThis is a re-read, but it's been at least 25 years since I've read the book. So I remembered the very broad strokes and the reveal, but not a lot else. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has just been fired from a factory job. He's young, a World War II veteran and is buying a house. That would be problem enough for how he's going to make his mortgage. But he's also black. And in Los Angeles in that means his ability to come up with the mortgage is incredibly limited. But his friend Joppy has an opportunity for him. He's hired by Dewitt Albright, a white private investigator, to look for a white girl named Daphne Monet who has gone missing and is known to frequent establishments in Watts, a black neighborhood in L.A. There's far more here than meets the eye and it goes in to much higher echelons of the L.A. establishment than Easy could ever have thought. And Easy, while intelligent and resourceful, is very much an amateur investigator which causes him a number of issues. This is a very traditional P.I. novel and Mosley hits most of the classic tropes. Which isn't inherently a bad thing because Easy being black and being in L.A. in 1948 gives Mosley the ability to stand many of them on their head. Of course there's the femme fatale in the person of Daphne. And there are plenty of villains to go around. Really it's the combination of the setting within the setting (Watts in L.A.), the time-frame, and the voice that Mosley gives to the black characters that make this so different and such a stand-out. My biggest complaint would be what I have dubbed as deus ex Mousechina. Pretty much every time that Easy gets in to a situation from which there is no escape...enter Mouse, Easy's psychotic friend from Houston to save his arse. It becomes just a bit too much. Still this is a very good book and a great first novel. It's also a ground-breaking novel. Before Easy there had been almost no black P.I.'s in literature. Maybe none at all. Chester Himes' Grave-Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, were NYPD detectives. I guess there was Shaft, but Ernest Tidyman was certainly white and I 've not read the books so I can't speak to the authenticity of the voice. Walter Mosley opened the floodgates with Easy Rawlins. And he did it in a very big and entertaining way.
I think I read this roughly around the time it first came out in paperback and liked it enough that I've always meant to carry on with the series but have yet to get around to doing so. I can see what you mean about Mouse, but having read only this first book in the series I can't say how that character will come across to me as it carries on.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 22, 2023 15:31:38 GMT -5
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley(...) My biggest complaint would be what I have dubbed as deus ex Mousechina. Pretty much every time that Easy gets in to a situation from which there is no escape...enter Mouse, Easy's psychotic friend from Houston to save his arse. It becomes just a bit too much. (...) Yep, this would be my main criticism of not only Devil in a Blue Dress, but the two subsequent novels as well (as noted in my reviews of them). Otherwise, though, I have to say that having read just over half of the Easy Rawlins books at this point (with a few more queued up on my shelf), they really get better as you go along.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 22, 2023 15:44:05 GMT -5
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley(...) My biggest complaint would be what I have dubbed as deus ex Mousechina. Pretty much every time that Easy gets in to a situation from which there is no escape...enter Mouse, Easy's psychotic friend from Houston to save his arse. It becomes just a bit too much. (...) Yep, this would be my main criticism of not only Devil in a Blue Dress, but the two subsequent novels as well (as noted in my reviews of them). Otherwise, though, I have to say that having read just over half of the Easy Rawlins books at this point (with a few more queued up on my shelf), they really get better as you go along.
That makes a lot of sense. Devil was his first novel. You'd expect he'd tend to get better as he honed his craft and did more work. It doesn't always work that way, but it certainly does frequently. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 23, 2023 16:28:01 GMT -5
So I can't remember how this came onto my radar (I think I saw a tweet about it) but when I heard about this, I tracked it down via ILL to read. Paul Malmont-The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril  So it's Lester Dent (Doc Savage author) and Walter Gibson (The Shadow writer) having a pulp adventure with the likes of Lovecraft, Heinlein, Hubbard and other pulp era names as part of the supporting cast. Sounded intriguing. And it had some things I liked, but way too much time spent either trying to impress the audience with his knowledge of the pulp era or foist his view of it to make it manifest (I don't know enough about the actual lives of the these pulp writers to be able to tell which he was doing) and way too much effort cramming every possible Easter Egg into the manuscript, effort that should have been spent of his plot, characters and narrative flow for me to come away really liking this. It was enjoyable, but extremely flawed (it was a first novel, so a little leeway is given). My Goodreads review expands on this a bit... My Goodreads review... A pulp adventure featuring pulp writers. An appealing concept and one I should have liked more than I did. Malmount's first novel shows a lot of potential but needed a stronger editorial hand and someone to tell him no to some of his tendencies to excess. Too much time waxing poetic about writing and injecting his views into the mouths of the likes of Orson Welles and others, and way too self-indulgent in trying to place Easter eggs throughout-need a newsboy, it's Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), a courier-it's Stanley Lieberman (Stan Lee), couple of guys commiserating failing to sell their illustrated sci-fi story tot he pulp publishers-it's Siegel & Shuster, etc. it all made the world seem exceedingly small, which is a killer in a story that should feel grand and epic, and it strained by suspension of disbelief more than any of the actual fantastic elements in the story to the point where it just destroyed any grounding the story needed for verisimilitude, which is an absolute must in the genre of telling fantastic adventures about the men who only really wrote fantasy not lived it. So it was enjoyable enough, but filled with way too many self-indulgences a strong editorial hand should have told Malmount to leave on the editing room floor. -M |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 23, 2023 18:20:14 GMT -5
 The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. I first read this shortly after it first came out...so a bit over ten years ago now. I recently got the sequel for crazy cheap as an e-book so I decided it was time for a re-read before tackling the next one. And I'm glad I did, because while I remembered the sweeping arc of the story I'd lost a lot of the specifics. And while I read it with a more discerning eye this time I still loved it. And why not? If there was ever a book that was written for me...it's this one. It's pure pulp. It grabs a hold of my 11-16 year old loves and mashes them all together into a stew of pulpy goodness. Walter Gibson and Lester Dent are thrown together to save the city and maybe the world from a menace straight out of The Shadow and Doc Savage. The whole thing spirals out of the death of H. P. Lovecraft. And along for the ride are L. Ron Hubbard, (and here lie spoilers folks) Robert Heinlein and Lew (I'll leave that one a mystery). There are tong hatchet men, deadly chemicals, zombies and a whole passel of fun There were also a few things that gnawed at me this time around that I don't think bugged me last time. Heinlein and Hubbard being constantly referred too as "the boys." This was particularly egregious with Heinlein who was only three years younger than Dent and was both a Annapolis graduate and a navy veteran. His characterization also didn't ring true. A little too naive, a little too skittish. On the other hand, it's pulp. People don't necessarily act on their nature in pulp...they act as necessary. And in pulp things happen because they need to happen. That's what the story dictates so that's what we get. And there were so many fun little things. The Golden Vulture being a plot-point. The creation of The Avenger. The fact that Lew's identity isn't ever really revealed (though you can figure it out if you try). The cameos by a number of other authors and comic creators...I know I didn't catch who Chester was the first time around. Thanks for this one. It's a very good read. And thankfully it's not great literature...it's PULP. @mrp I liked it a lot better than you did. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 23, 2023 18:39:33 GMT -5
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. I first read this shortly after it first came out...so a bit over ten years ago now. I recently got the sequel for crazy cheap as an e-book so I decided it was time for a re-read before tackling the next one. And I'm glad I did, because while I remembered the sweeping arc of the story I'd lost a lot of the specifics. And while I read it with a more discerning eye this time I still loved it. And why not? If there was ever a book that was written for me...it's this one. It's pure pulp. It grabs a hold of my 11-16 year old loves and mashes them all together into a stew of pulpy goodness. Walter Gibson and Lester Dent are thrown together to save the city and maybe the world from a menace straight out of The Shadow and Doc Savage. The whole thing spirals out of the death of H. P. Lovecraft. And along for the ride are L. Ron Hubbard, (and here lie spoilers folks) Robert Heinlein and Lew (I'll leave that one a mystery). There are tong hatchet men, deadly chemicals, zombies and a whole passel of fun There were also a few things that gnawed at me this time around that I don't think bugged me last time. Heinlein and Hubbard being constantly referred too as "the boys." This was particularly egregious with Heinlein who was only three years younger than Dent and was both a Annapolis graduate and a navy veteran. His characterization also didn't ring true. A little too naive, a little too skittish. On the other hand, it's pulp. People don't necessarily act on their nature in pulp...they act as necessary. And in pulp things happen because they need to happen. That's what the story dictates so that's what we get. And there were so many fun little things. The Golden Vulture being a plot-point. The creation of The Avenger. The fact that Lew's identity isn't ever really revealed (though you can figure it out if you try). The cameos by a number of other authors and comic creators...I know I didn't catch who Chester was the first time around. Thanks for this one. It's a very good read. And thankfully it's not great literature...it's PULP. @mrp I liked it a lot better than you did. I was enjoying it a lot until the chase scene with Lee and Kirby where everything was just too pat, convenient and a bit deus ex machina, and the lunch with Orson Welles where Welles was just pontification the whole time in a voice that just rang false and felt like Welles was just a mouthpiece for the author to put his opinion into the aether. There was a lot to like, but with a stronger editorial pass I would have liked it a whole lot more. Once those two scenes set my Spidey sense tingling, I started noticing every little flaw in there. It did make me want to take a deeper dive into some pulp, so in that it was successful. And the acknowledgements are a rich trove to plunder for other books to check out. -M |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 24, 2023 16:07:51 GMT -5
Not understanding why so many people I have great respect for take for granted that free will does not exist, I just read Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves.
I'm no better off than I was. Dennett uses several chapters to describe the naturalistic evolution of altruism, the impact that our development has on our choices, and on dismissing the concept of the self-forming action. Nothing which is incompatible with free will. Dennett also explains his vision of compatibilism, and it's all done in a very enjoyable style and with great clarity. However, and perhaps because his book is meant for hard core free will denialists like Jerry Coyne, nothing I read in there shows me why free will couldn't exist as an emergent property of enough neurons connected in one network. (If anything, I think Dennett makes a better case for the self being an illusion, something I can at least intuitively relate to.)
I don't think the ghost in the machine of Descartes makes any sense; ample documentation shows that a personality can be radically altered with the right combination of chemical drugs or physical trauma, and it most definitely does not exist outside of a functioning brain. But we certainly act as if we had free will, and barring evidence to the contrary, I think that the existence of free will should be the default proposition. (Evidence to the contrary has been published, but I would say that it is not all that convincing. The most impressive evidence mostly suggests, at least to me, that it is our sense of identity that is an illusion; not the process of making choices independently of outside factors).
One thing I would agree with is that it doesn't matter if free will exists or not; when things happen depends on an observer's position, so time is not absolute even if the chain of causality is. I would accept that like a Norn tapestry, our future is already woven; it's just that from our point of observation in space-time, we can't see what it's like nor can predict it precisely. That is not incompatible with free will, however. When Hamlet reflects in hindsight upon all his sins, all committed willfully I'd expect, he cannot change any of them; but he did have a choice at the time. Anyway... I'm out of my league, here.
Gotta say this for Dennett, though: the man is one fine writer.
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