bunrab: (alien reading)
I have this whole bunch of graphic/comic stuff I'm returning to the library, and I thought I'd tweet each of them, while we were in the car on the way. But it turns out I have more than 140 characters to say about each. So here I am, sitting at one of the library's computers, before returning the books.

Let"s see. The first two, Locke & Key and Johnny Bunko, have some tweets that"ll show up, so I don't need to say too much more about those. L&K is a good fantasy, lots of content, nice spooky premise. I actually look forward to the next volume of this one. JB is confused about who its audience might be - it claims to be a book of serious career advice, that happens to be done manga style, but it seems as though people reading manga want story, not advice. Luckily, the story is pretty funny - magic take-out chopsticks!

Para by Stuart Moore - I wanted to like this one, because it's got lots of text - some pages are illustrated text, rather than cartoons with words. And the starting premise is good - an alternate history where the Supercollider in TX turns into a big radioactive pit... and it's some 20 years later and researchers want to find out exactly what happened. The FBI is hampering their efforts. Unfortunately, for my tastes, it turns into paranormal bullshit, woo-woo pseudo-science. Despite that, though, I have to say I actually liked the UFO guy as a character - he has a nice sense of humor about his own endeavors. And the nasty FBI agent turns out to have her good spots. Drawing style: realistic tending toward dark, lots of grey-blue; aliens are stupid-looking. And the frogs never do get explained.

WE3 by Grant Morrison - reminded me a lot of Dean Koontz's Watchers. Three weaponized animals - a dog, cat, and rabbit - escape the termination of their project. I love how they have bits of speech; I was sad that the bunny was the one that died; I liked the ending. Style: colorful (the shell armor looks like a cross between pastel easter eggs and water lotuses, crossed with pillbugs).

The Book of Lost Souls by Straczynski and Doran. Fantasy, dark; not always sure who the good guys are. The episode with the battered woman- interesting. And the hired killer, who finally gets his - good. Still, though, sorta woo-woo in here about tortured savior and how people are "saved." But I like the Road.

Also read: Aya of Yop - couldn't get into it; teenage angst is teenage angst even if it's in Cote d'Ivoire - just as pointless as Ghost World, to me. Not enough story. And Megillat Esther, which I had seen reviews of - sort of a must-do, if one is of Jewish background. It does a nice job of pointing out some of the ridiculousness and some of the repetition-but-with-contradictions that occurs in many bible stories.

OK, now to take these over to the return desk.
bunrab: (alien reading)
some of which must return to library Thursday. So I'd better mention 'em now.

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent - amusic, sometimes superficial. He makes an interesting case, in his chapter about the SCA, for the way the SCA manages to create nerd jocks, unlike most nerdy groups.

Recovery Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - latest in her Retrieval Artist (Miles Flint) series; all the books in this series are seriously good crime fic/mystery fic as well as quite acceptable science fiction - a far more serious blend of SF elements than, say, J.D. Robb. I like the way she does really alien aliens. And I like the dry sense of humor that sneaks in occasionally. This volume has far more to do with Miles' past history/personal life than any of the previous ones. One of the things I like best is how realistic the characters are - even the nasty-guy Recovery Man has some sophisticated thoughts and thinks about what he's doing, not an all-evil-all-the-time-just-because villain.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck. Well, of course, RVs/motor homes/campers are a lot more common now than they were in 1960, and the interstate highway system is a lot more complete (even in some of its deteriorating-infrastructure state), so some of the book is a bit dated. But it's still interesting, especially the postscript about the Kennedy inauguration - coming up as we are on the Obama inauguration, which, you will recall, is more or less a local event where I am; yes, traffic and security and whatnot for DC does stretch all the way to our area.

I had briefly mentioned Odysseus on the Rhine but didn't say anything about it, and I should. It's a sequel to The Odyssey and before you go "ewwww" please listen when I say it's quite nicely done. I've added a review to Amazon.com, which should be posted within a few hours. (And if you read it and like it, besides the Yes button, could you possibly add a comment? I'm a glutton for comments, and they keep Amazon from thinking that it's the same few fans all the time. Thanks!)
bunrab: (Default)
Okay, some Amazon.com reviews - read 'em, click the little Yes button, you know the drill:
This Might Not Be Pretty (a Stone Soup comic strip collection) by Jan Eliot
Grease Monkey by Tim Eldred - already mentioned this one; it's on my "favorite books this year" list.

Briefly in tweets I quoted from A Short History of Rudeness by Mark Caldwell. It was written about 10 years ago, so the chapter on the internet is overwrought and out of date. And the chapter on Martha Stewart is just plain weird, has nothing to do with the rest of the book. But nonetheless there's some interesting reading in some of the chapters, particularly about how the rise in mobility (more and more individual transportation) contributed to the world being ruder.

From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell - a re-release of the first Inspector Wexford novel. From 1964. I've never gotten around to reading any Rendell before. Eh. I could see the plot twist coming a mile away. And I find the whole thing too British for me. In order to read the story smoothly, one has to be familiar with the British school system, and with the whole "this neighborhood in London automatically conveys such-and-such a social and economic class" thing, which is not information I've ever cared to internalize. I know a lot of people don't mind it; it's a personal thing to prefer novels set in places where I know the milieu.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, that's an 8.) Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Very, very funny book. Especially the chapter on why Chinese food is "the chosen food of the Chosen People, or, The Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989." The history of General Tso's Chicken, the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world, and a comparison of the McDonalds model as Windows and the Chinese restaurant model as Linux. I bet almost everyone on my flist would find something to enjoy in this one.

Michael Chabon's The Final Solution - a short book that, although it never mentions the name, is clearly meant to be a sort of alternate-history "Sherlock Holmes lives to a ripe old age in rural England." A quick read, nice enough, and the parrot is a nice character.

Welcome to Tranquility by Gail Simone and Neil Googe - another graphic novel, this one a very loving send-up of old-fashioned comic books, the kind from the 1940's through 1960's, with a touch of how counterculture and Goths and Postmodernism took over from those. The plot is set in the town of Tranquility, where all the retired maxi-heroes (someone must have a copyright on "super-heroes") live. And the young African-American female sheriff who gets to try to keep the whole town calm. Probably MORE fun reading for someone my age, who read all those '60's comics books at the time, than for younger people who don't have that whole context.

Oh, and of course The Eight by Katherine Neville, already mentioned that it was in progress. Finished it. A bit silly and complicated in many spots - requires a willing suspension of disbelief for the fantasy element that sneaks in, as with any magical/religious object that exerts mysterious powers over people, even though otherwise set in the "real world." And quite a bit of the whole Freemasons/Rosicrucians/gigantic historical conspiracy wingnut stuff as part of it. Good fun, though, and I liked many of the side digressions, such as the tale the 18th-century chess player tells of meeting J.S. Bach. On the whole, a bit non-sequitur-ish, as the mystical power of the chess set at the end has nothing to do with how it was introduced at the beginning, but nonetheless a good adventure thriller, sort of "what if Indiana Jones were a woman working for a big-8 accounting firm in the 1970's?" with a whole bunch of French Revolution and other international travel thrown in.

Okay. Gotta go change clothes for yet another band Christmas concert tonight. Whee. "Sleigh Ride" till our lips fall off.

reading

Oct. 8th, 2008 04:41 pm
bunrab: (alien reading)
A few posts ago, I mentioned Dave Freer's A Mankind Witch, and in truth it was a bit from that, as much as Granny Ogg's writings, that inspired the post "To Serve Rat." Oddly enough, *after* that was when I ran across the book Rats: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from whence came yesterday's tweets about rats. And then, AFTER I had twittered those, I read the newspaper, and lo! an article about rats in Baltimore! The city is proposing a rat census, as the first step in reducing Baltimore's rat problem; the initial estimate of the number of rats in Baltimore City is 3 million! Which is quite a bit more than one for every fifteen people - Baltimore City is only about 700,000 people, although the metro area of much of Baltimore County is well over a million.

And the slightly odd tone of the above paragraph may be explained by the fact that I am currently reading John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor - a book that had never held the slightest interest for me, until 1001 Books for Every Mood happened to mention that it wasn't just a detailed historical novel of colonial America, it was also a hysterically funny soap opera of a tale. And indeed, in Barth's introduction to the edition I happened to get from the library, he states right out that his intent was to write as much in the style of Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) as he could. So far I am having fun reading it, although it has to be gone at only a couple dozen pages at a time, and it is a great fat book, so it will take a while. And for that while, it will undoubtedly continue to influence my writing style. Perhaps not quite as wordy as when I read Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards, which had me talking funny for weeks, as well as writing, but still funnier than ordinary twenty-first century Kelly.
bunrab: (squirrel_sweater)
Please note: the following does not reflect my actual views on rats. I love ratties. They are terrific pets. They are sweet and intelligent. But this is what sprang, full-blown, into my head after reading just the wrong page of a fantasy novel set in a medieval-ish setting, at just the wrong moment.
To Serve Rat



Rats for RenFairs
Rat Drumsticks
Because the rat drumstick is not as meaty as the turkey drumstick, it is only economical to prepare in large batches at once. However, one must take precautions when frying the drumsticks, so that they do not stick together in one large mass. Therefore, after dipping them in the usual batter, roll each drumstick in a coating of finely crushed cornflakes or riceflakes, before stacking in frying basket. Stir frequently while frying.

Rat On A Stick
Although the traditional method of serving rat-on-a-stick is to use the entire body, roasted on its own little spit, the average RenFair attendee is not prepared to deal with removing feet, wings, tail, or head. Therefore, to minimize trouble (and to minimize garbage and leftovers littering the grounds), it is best to prepare rat kabobs of rib, loin, and breast chunks; this satisfies the requirement of being on a stick, while being much easier to eat.

Fried Wings ("Rattalo Wings")
Because the rat wings are quite bony, as with most wings, it is not advisable to serve these to audiences which will be standing, walking around, and talking. Reserve bowls of Rattalo Wings for the dining pavilion, where dishes for the bones can be provided at each table.

Authentic Rat Dishes
Rats-Ear Soup
Perhaps the best known rat dish is the delicacy Rats-Ear Soup. This would be served around harvest time by wealthy land-owners, to prove that they had removed all the rats from their silos before completely filling them (and to show off that they had the servants and chef to prepare such a labor-intensive delicacy). For the less-wealthy, or for those who had enough cats, ferrets, or cobras that they never had a sufficient supply of rats, a Mock Rats-Ear Soup would be prepared using shavings of mushroom. Often the host would purchase a small bag of genuine rats' ears from a market, to sprinkle just a couple into each bowl of Mock Rats-Ear.

Stuffed Rat
Because of the relatively small amount of meat on each rat, to stretch out each serving, a cook would stuff the rat. The fanciest preparation would be to stuff a mouse inside the rat, and an almond inside the mouse; this also served to supplement the amount of protein in the dish. A sauce would be prepared of cream, ground almonds, and, during harvest season, pomegranate seeds.

Ketchup

Sep. 15th, 2008 11:53 pm
bunrab: (Default)
Okay, so after the flu in the middle of August and then a week at Sally's inhaling dust, I couldn't stop coughing and I felt even more fatigued than usual; eventually I started thinking maybe there's fluid in my lungs, so I went to the doc. Apparently not fluid, just inflamation, so using steroid inhaler (as of this past Wed) to reduce inflamation; it's working a bit, I guess - still coughing and stuff, but nearly back to only tired all the time instead of exhausted to the point of not getting out of bed.

I got a couple of RL projects done - finally finished a couple of bedside rugs I've been working on for me and [livejournal.com profile] squirrel_magnet, since cooler weather is coming and we may not want to step onto cold floors. I'll try to get pictures of them sometime soon. Started work on wedding gift for my cousin Jesse who got married last September - goal is to finish the stuff (quilted table runner and 4 placemats) and mail them off by the end of this month, a year after the wedding. Still cleaning up bits and pieces at old house; we buried Lamarck chinchilla who passed away this past spring and had been in the freezer, and I put a stepping stone on his grave - I'll take a picture of that, too, when I get a chance.

And there has been reading, as usual:

Book I did not finish: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Forty years ago I didn't make it ten pages in before giving up out of total lack of interest in figuring out who these characters were; twenty years ago I made it about twenty pages in; this time, all the way to page 27 before closing it again. I do not care enough about Hindu mythology and other mythology to follow who these characters are, who is an avatar of who else, who is on which side... I just don't care.

Book I didn't like: White Oleander by Janet Fitch. This was apparently a big bestseller and very popular with book clubs, and it reads exactly as if it were written to be a book club discussion subject, and I don't mean that kindly. Where some reviewer sees a "surprising journey of self-discovery" I see a protagonist who stays stupid the whole way through - she doesn't make the same mistake twice, but she makes new and dumber ones all the time, and never seems to wise up and stop approaching life as a manipulating but clueless slut. We're supposed to care about what she learns from each of her foster mothers, and compare them, but she doesn't ever seem to learn any rational kind of lesson. Even when her own mother gets out of jail, she isn't really happy. This book doesn't really have much of a plot; the character grows older but doesn't grow up; her mother gets out of jail but that's just a small paragraph amidst the general whining and indecisiveness. Bleah. I know thousands of people disagree with this evaluation of the book; clearly, many people are looking more for "emotionally gripping" than for "fast-moving plot and rational characters."

And for stuff I did enjoy: Watchers by Dean Koontz - not great literature, but a fast-moving plot and nice characters! This is the first Koontz I've ever read - somehow managed to not get around to any till now. This one features a golden retriever named Einstein, genetically modified to near-human intelligence, able to read and even converse in writing. Plot also includes a nastier genetically modified character, the Outsider, and along the way we are supposed to compare the Outsider and Vince the mob hit-man, and notice which of them is really less human and kills more people. That part is a bit obvious. But hey, it's a good story, and most of the characters are likeable, and there's a more-or-less happy ending.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. This is a novel about a historian who is researching Vlad Tepes, who turns out to be an immortal vampire after all, sort of, only not. It's a very long book, and some of it was longer than need be - in almost a deliberate imitation of Victorian style, there is much more exposition, and jumping back from generation to generation, and words upon words, than is really necessary. Sometimes one can lose track of which generation is taking place - is it our female protagonist as a teenager listening to her father tell about his research, or the father listening to his mentor from a generation earlier, or is it 30 years later? We run through all sorts of minute historical detail from the 1470's onward. I admit to skimming in spots.

Smoke-Filled Rooms by Kris Nelscott - a murder mystery set during the 1968 Chicago convention, featuring a black, male, PI - written in the first person by Nelscott, which is one of Kristen Kathryn Rusch's pen names. So, quite a feat of characterization. Anyway, a decent mystery, though a bit of gory torture of the sort I really don't think could go unnoticed for so long. Much of the plot is timely enough given this election year. I'll probably look for the rest of the series.

The Apostate's Tale by Margaret Frazer - most recent in her Dame Frevisse series, and this one returns more to the priory (convent) after the last couple of very political volumes. The last two were almost entirely about English political uprisings and Frevisse's cousin Alice, and I was not crazy about them; I was glad to see this one get back to the day to day details of everyday life in the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, it's probably the last one, since it ends with Frevisse becoming Prioress, and also it's set in 1452, so any ten minutes now the printing press is going to come along and destroy the priory's book-copying business and only source of income.

Warning: I am going to attempt Twittering. No telling what may show up.

Now to go see if I can catch up on a couple of weeks of unread flist. Speaking of, Chas, your bday present will be in the mail tomorrow. [livejournal.com profile] richspk, speaking of addresses, I need your snail mail address. Email me, plz.
bunrab: (alien reading)
A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. Possibly the most annoying book I'll read this year - but I knew it would be going in; I just wanted to see whether the reviews I had read had conveyed an accurate impression. Sure enough, they have. Clark is a conservative English economist who thinks that it's your own fault you're poor if you didn't have the good sense to choose to be born White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And that the English class system is actually the ideal system for breeding the sorts of person who would be perfectly suited for taking over industrial capitalism. We have graphs that don't show what he claims in the text they show, mistakes of correlation for causation, switching of cause and effect, and a great many blanket statements with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
Countries such as Malawia or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state.
Oh? While the rest of the world advances?
and
...there is ample evidence that wealth, and wealth alone, is the crucial determinant of lifestyles, both within and between societies.
And later on he goes to state equally blanketly that wealth, and the amount of stuff you can purchase as a consumer, are the main, if not only, determinants of how happy you are. Oh, and here's another one, wherein he manages to get things exactly backward:
...Europeans were lucky to be a filthy people who squatted happily above their own feces, stored in basement cesspits, in cities such as London. Poor hygiene, sombined with high urbanization rates with their attendant health issues, meant income had to be high to maintain the population in eighteenth-century England and the Netherlands. The Japanese, with a more highly developed sense of cleanliness, could maintain the level of population at miserable levels of material comforts, and they were accordingly condemned to subsist on a much more limited income.
He makes fun of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and pretends that comparing wages and prices in Malawi in 2001 is not completely apples-to-oranges with English wages in 1800, as though subsistence farming were exactly the same in both, and the types of craftspeople needed, and products needed, were the same in both, and as though initial climate conditions, health conditions, geography, degree of urbanization, etc., were the same in both, so that he can prove that the English are superior in all ways. He feels that the only area where England historically was not perhaps perfect was in the area of intellectual property rights. Really. Enough of that. Let's change the subject, he's not worth continuing with.

The History of the Snowman by Bob Eckstein. Very funny, though those who collect snowglobes may be a little offended at his suggestion that they are the ultimate form of kitsch. This would be a perfect secular winter holiday gift for many people. And the illustrations are the best part - the history of the use of snowmen in advertisements, the very first occurance of a snowman in artwork in recorded history, the world's largest snowman. He runs into feminist criticisms of snowmen, and also a giant French snow-woman representing revolutionary Paris. Perhaps my favorite illustration was the print of an anonymously-done fresco in Italy from 1403, the very first depiction of a snowball fight in recorded history. INcluding a lady in full dress being smushed in the face by a snowball.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. A must for biology nerds; perhaps a skip for people who have no idea what a Hox gene is - although portions of the book are about gross anatomy, it's not just molecular biology. I should note that I have been reading this one at supper while [livejournal.com profile] squirrel_magnet has been reading Napoleon's Buttons which is pop science about organic chemistry; we have looked really nerdy. Anyway, Shubin, the guy who more or less discovered Tiktaalik, the fish with wrists, is a good writer, and we hear lots about what it's like to go on paleontological expeditions, as well as how to give a skate an extra set of wings.

The Book of Ballads illustrated by Charles Vess. Introduction by Terri Windling. Various fantasy authors (and Sharyn McCrumb, who uses folk songs in her mysteries) pick their favorite Child ballads and construct some sort of back-story, and then Vess illustrates the backstory and parts of the ballad. Neil Gaiman chooses "The False Knight on the Road" and we see the boy at home with his elderly ma before heading off to school. Jane Yolen chooses "King Henry" which is one of my favorites of Steeleye Span's - oh, and in the back of the book, there's a discography of various groups who have recorded these songs, with Steeleye and Fairport Convention being the main suspects, of course. Sharyn McCrumb chose "Thomas the Rhymer." Midori Snyder chose "Barbara Allen" with perhaps the most complicated backstory. Elaine Lee chose "Tam-Lin" and I was least happy with the illustrations of that - not a style I liked at all. Anyway, there's several more, and if you are fantasy fan or folk-song fan or both (yes, I'm looking at you, [livejournal.com profile] angevin2), you will want to take a look at this book.

This is my Funniest edited by Mike Resnick. An anthology of "leading science fiction writers present their funniest stories ever" thereby proving that an author is not necessarily the best judge of what's funny. My favorite was Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters" but although it's funny, I don't think it's his funniest. Gardner Dozois' "The Hanging Curve" didn't even strike me as funny (and there's an intended pun there.) Anyway, there were enough good ones that it wasn't a waste of time, but not enough that you'd necessarily want to pay brand new trade paperback prices - used would be about right.

More later. Mostly, we've been doing house stuff - spent most of yesterday putting together flat-pack furniture in the new house; today and the next couple days, the electricity is off there while the electricians do the upgrades on the circuit box and attendant matters, so maybe we'll actually do some packing over here instead.
bunrab: (alien reading)
I did warn y'all that my attempt to read more nonfiction and a lower percentage of murder mysteries was going to probably mean a lot of pop science. Well, here's some of that:

Fish That Fake Orgasms, and other zoological curiosities by Matt Walker - whole bunch of biology trivia, in little factiod snippets. Not completely accurate, either; he consistently refers to the domestic horse as equus callabus instead of equus caballus, and apparently no proofreader or copy editor caught it.

Father Knows Less, or, Can I Cook My Sister? by Wendell Jamieson. One man's attempt to find answers to all the weird questions his five year old son asks. He also collects odd questions from other people's children, and even some of the ones he asked his father when he was around 5. After collecting all these questions, he then goes to various experts to find answers - the director of the Division of Pain Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, for example, to answer the question, "What would hurt more: getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?" and to the official historian of the FBI in Washington DC, to answer , "Why is it called 'kidnapping' if you can steal away adults, too?"

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby. Endersby is English, and so this history is slightly Anglocentric, but nonetheless good. Basically, it's the story of how the mating of a USDA colony of guinea pigs with a bunch of wild Russian fruit flies led to modern molecular biology. No, really, it's sort of an era-by-era look at biology by looking at what plants and animals were being studied, when. We start with the quagga, which went extinct in 1883, in a chapter titled "Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare" and go on through a plant in Darwin's greenhouse, homo sapiens as Francis Galton's research animal, Mendel's work on the pale hawkweed; Hugo de Vries and some flower; then, "Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks" which ties back to Galton. Finally, we get to chapter 7, "Cavia porcellus: mathematical guinea pigs." We get a history of the domestication of the cavy, and of the naming of it, and then of Abraham Lincoln's establishment of the USDA in 1862, and within only a few decades, the USDA had a large colony of guinea pigs at its experimental farm in Maryland - which I happen to know where that was; we drive past the current Dept. of Agriculture site along Rt. 29 regularly, and every time I see its enormous front lawn now, I envision piggies browsing there. Sewall Wright, who had started working on guinea pigs accidentally as a grad student at Harvard, kept in touch with JBS Haldane from about 1915 on. Haldane and his sister had had a huge bunch of guinea pigs as children:
...his sister Naomi (who would later become a celebrated novelist under her married name, Naomi Mitchison) developed an allergy to the horses she had loved and took up keeping guinea pigs instead. She loved the animals and knew many of them by name; she could impersonate their squeaks and grunts so well that they would answer her. When her elder brother came home from Eton for the school holidays and discovered her new pets, he 'suggested that we should try out what was then called Mendelism on them.' She agreed, deciding that 'Mendelism seemed quite within my intellectual grasp,' and so her pet population began to expand. ... One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, behind wire fencing, were 300 guinea pigs.
Anyway, Haldane's work interested Wright, and Wright went to work for the USDA. And therein lies the tale. By the way, did you know that guinea pigs helped win twenty-three Nobel prizes?

The book does continue after that, to the bacteriophage virus, corn, a plant called mouse-ear cress (at least in England), the zebrafish - still in use in a lot of heart research! - and finally OncoMouse (r), the first patented, transgenic animal.

Great but serious reading, not written for humor like the first two or like Where's My Jetpack? from a previous post (that one was actually written almost entirely for the sake of being sarcastic).
bunrab: (alien reading)
In no particular order:
Dead of Night, an anthology of 4 novellas billed as "paranormal stories" - which mostly aren't. The J.D. Robb story, which has top billing, is an Eve Dallas story, and although it involves vampire wannabes, there are no paranormal characters at all. The next two stories are time-travel romances, and except for the device, in one, of a ghost giving the pretext for the time travel, there are no supernatural characters in those either. And the last story is a 21st century retake on "It's a Wonderful Life" - and again, except for the "magic carpet" that allows our heroine to see what life would have been like had she not married who she did, there is nothing else paranormal - no supernatural characters. So if the red cover with spooky illustration were leading one to expect vampires, witches, and midnight rituals, one would be rather mislead. OTOH, if one merely wants to read a decent installment in the Eve Dallas mystery series, then this would be it.
Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove. An alternate history, in which the east coast of North America is instead a separate continent off the eastern shore of NA in the middle of the Atlantic. It's not a bad story, though as usual with Turtledove, it is made into a fatter book than it needs to be by the addition of far too many battle scenes; there are several places where one can skim through 20 pages at a time by reading only the middle line of each page, to see whether anyone important has been killed, and avoid all the blood spilling in the mud and people discussing attack strategy. There are a couple of sly nods to our timeline. And a couple of fun hints at how Atlantis might resemble, say, Madagascar.
The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nazum. Subtitled "Stalking vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula," this is nonfiction about the author's investigation of various parts of the "vampire subculture." He meets groups of people who think they are vampires, goes on a Dracula tour of Europe, attends a Dark Shadows convention, plays a vampire at a Halloween haunted house... it's a very funny book, but also sort of sad, as Nazum makes it clear that there are far too many people out there who don't just read fantasy; they spend a great portion of their time and energy being upset and unhappy that the real world does not contain their fantasy characters. Incidentally, though he sets out to try and watch every vampire movie ever made, "All told, I made it through 216 films - 389 films short of my goal. At first it may seem like a failure or cop-out, but 216 films is probably about 200 more than should be humanly permissible."
Downsizing Your Home With Style by Lauri Ward. I guess there are some people who need entire hardcover books to give them such common advice as "If you have a small living room, buy a shorter sofa," and tell them that built-in bookcases are a great storage idea. Oh, and a windowseat is a great place for additional hidden storage! Sheeee.
Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer. Though it's still a "popular" book rather than an academic one, it is less breezy and fun than, say, John McWhorter or Bill Bryson. There are many pages of line-by-line analysis of how alliterative rhymes work in Beowulf, the importance of subject-verb order in Old English, and vowel shifts from Old English to Middle English, and for that matter, deep comparisons between early Middle English and late Middle English. I think it's fascinating, but I wouldn't go recommending this to all and sundry as fun reading, the way I do with McWhorter. Later chapters deal with the divergence of American and British English, and use WW2 journalism to give some examples. Typical sentence: "Chaucer does not so much 'invent' a new English as much as he invents the pose of someone who invents a new English."
Food: The History of Taste edited by Paul Freedman. What this is, really, is the art history of food - the chapters are illustrated with paintings, from cave art to 20th century advertisements, and many of the authors concentrate on how the art of a given period can tell us a lot about the diet of people during that period. An illustration of a meal in a brothel from a German manuscript of about 1470, to illustrate the deadly sins of gluttony and lust. Lots of Greek urns and bas reliefs. Roman mosaics - dining room floors were often tiled with illustrations of food. One thing I noted is how many of the pictures, across continents and millenia, seem to include dogs at the table - apparently, up until our own time, a dining table would probably be more likely to have plates missing, than dogs. One of my favorite illustrations is from Philippe Sylvestre Dufour's 1671 treatise, Traite nouveau & curieux du café, du thé, et du chocolat, of a Turk, a Chinese man, and a Native American with their respective drinks. I wondered why the chapter on "The Birth of the Modern Consumer Age" about the period from 1800 to the first quarter of the 20th century seemed to have so many illustrations of advertisements in German, then I looked back and noticed that the author of that chapter was one Hans Teutenberg. Well, that would explain it. [livejournal.com profile] angevin2, you might enjoy the list, in the chapter on food fashions just after the Renaissance, of titles of dietetic manuals/cookbooks from England: Thomas Elyot's Castel of Helth (1534), Andrew Boorde's Compendyous Regyment of a Dyetary of Health (1542) and so on.

Whew, there's more, but that's the stack that is taking up the bulk of my computer desk here.
bunrab: (alien reading)
OK, let's see. The Cymry Ring by Michael Allen Dymmoch. I had previously read one of Dymmoch's books, Murder in West Wheeling, a humorous mystery, and I guess I expected another similar. Instead, what I got was time travel. Not terribly SF, since the mechanism by which the time travel works is never explained - just, her dad has a time travel machine, she uses it, poof it gets blown up, and that's all we ever hear about it. But an interesting story anyway; our protagonists travel back to Wales in Roman/Boudiccan times.
In the Company of Books; Literature And Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-century America by Sarah Wadsworth. Obviously started its life as someone's doctoral dissertation. Basically an explanation of how the market for fiction came to be segmented out into books for adults vs. books for children, books for women different from books for men, books for boys different from books for girls, books for the lower economic clases vs. books for the elite, and books for rural families vs. books for urban readers. Before the 1800's there really wasn't any such market segmentation. Examinations of Louisa May Alcott's specific role as a writer of "girls books" and how the marketing of such was being developed, and Samuel Clemens' ambivalence about being typed as a writer of "boys books." Having the brief recaps of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn here turned out to be useful, because I hadn't reread those since I read them once as a kid - I never liked them that much. Nonetheless, the refresher turned out to be useful for another book I read:
A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing) by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach. A title which is hugely misleading, because although the book has 20 short pieces, not all of them are stories, or even fiction, some of them are only related to history because they're collected in a book that claims to be US history and otherwise nobody would think the stories were about US history. Certainly the David Rees comic isn't a story. OTOH, the story which purports to be the further adventures of Huck Finn in New Orleans was hysterically funny, and I wouldn't have appreciated it nearly as much had I not been reminded just previously of some of the details of the original. The story about a Russian immigrant girl in the early 20th century is touching. Most of the stories, however, were way too postmodern for my taste.
Air America: The Playbook with an intro by Al Franken, is mostly transcripts from the radio shows: interviews, excerpts from the Creep of the Week feature, etc. Funny in spots, but a lot of this worked much better on air than it does as reading.

Other than that, a bunch of magazines, as usual.

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