Magician's Nephew - You Unlock this Door

Well, I'm back after a sort of sabbatical from LT and from other things too. Last year was a hard year.

I'm Jim a retired computer programmer and software architect and guy who had a great career making computers do what i wanted them to do - sometimes.

I'm an armchair historian fascinated by the people and the processes that are sort of an explanation of how we got - as a species, as a people - from there to here.

I love words and reading and speaking and reciting and listening to people read and recite and act words. Writers are magicians. Tell me a story.

The title of this thread is from Rod Serling whose "Twilight Zone" taught me to see the world from other points of view with vision and clarity and wisdom and empathy -- through a glass darkly and under the unearthly light of another moon.

Glad to be back

and i like to end my posts with quotations. Here's one.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination.
Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.
-- Rod Serling

and of books

Welcome back, Jim!

This is from a gallery show we saw of an American artist named Ed Ruscha. He liked painting signs he saw traveling around the open American Southwest. This is one of them.

I'll just hang it on the wall over here.

Happy reading in 2024, Jim!

Happy new year, Jim.

I think it's important when starting a new thread to level set - let my readers know what they can expect going forward.

Back in the day there was a Carnegie-built library in Elmhurst, NY, small and a little shabby, and as a kid I more or less lived there. And one day I found on a "to be shelved" page this learned tone.



It's about a stegosaurus named George who (a) is still alive in the American southwest circa 1955 (b) can speak and understand English and (c) is shy and like Mr. Ed, only talks to a very few people.

He meets two spunky kids - I read a lot of books about spunky kids in those days - and has comic mis-adventures and helps to capture some bank robbers and more or less saves the ranch from foreclosure.

It's a sweet little book published by Scholastic and its matter of fact goofiness delighted my ten year old mind. And a copy fell into my hands recently and it delighted me again.

Fun. We're off.

"Credo quia absurdum"
-- Tertullian

Yay for childhood favorites! And I hope 24 is a better year for you.

Good to see you back, Jim. >6 magicians_nephew: Love the nostalgic read, very colourful cover and they look like '50s kids.

Thanks for stopping by, you two.

My Book Club took a look at Balzac and his Eugenie Grandet and the old boy can still get a lively discussion going years after his death.

This is the one, part of his "Human Comedy" series, about the pathologically twisted miser, old Grandet, who has stacks and stacks of gold louis in his locked storeroom but lives like the poor cooper he started out as, forcing his family to dine on scanty rations and live in a squalid slum. He's Scrooge but he's not funny.

But his daughter Eugenie has come of age, and everybody knows she will be the old man's heir, and so the grandees of the country are flocking to seek her hand. Purely a business deal, you understand. All marriages are.

BUT then her young hot cousin from Paris shows up and Eugenie loses her head to this handsome stranger. She will learn.

Balzac brings these people brilliantly to life with all their frailty. Comedy, not so much. Human, definitely.

The ending is a tragedy -- and a sadness. You may not like Eugenie's choices. You may find them the only choices possible.

But lovely, compassionate storytelling. Exciting to revisit it.

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
-- Charles Dickens

My "reading" on Audible (while exercising or taking meds) is Rachel Maddow's new Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism about the rise of fascism in American in the 1930's

Perhaps it's useful to see what the dictionary has to say:

Fascism: a political philosophy that exalts nation and race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

Fascism never really got going in America to be sure but there were demagogues and shadowy figures a'plenty who would have sure as heck liked it to.

Father Coughlin the "Radio Priest" spread "America First" racism and xenophobia on a national scale while Huey Long and his bully boy rhetoric and his armed thugs spread terror in his fiefdom of Louisiana. You may have heard of those two. There are lots of others in here you probably have never heard of.

Maddow is not slow about drawing parallels between then and now (her title, for example) but she's doesn't rub your nose in it. She doesn't have to.

Can it happen here? I still say no. But I've been wrong before.

"History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to perhaps be useful to the modern traveller"
-- Henry Glassie

Hi Jim! Happy New Thread, happy 2024 to you.

>6 magicians_nephew: I am thrilled to see The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek here. I read and loved it as a child, and bought myself a copy sometime before I joined LT in 2007. I’ve also got my original-from-Scholastic The Enormous Egg.

>10 magicians_nephew: I hope you’re right and that the fascist forces trying to rise here do not. I’m not looking at/reading much news these days, I’m afraid.

Thanks Karen for stopping by.

I'm pleased to find so much Shy Stegosaurus love here on LT

>10 magicians_nephew:. I hope you are right about facism here! That sounds like an interesting book.

Do you know who Stephen Sondheim is? Of Course you do.

Finishing The Hat and Look I Made a Hat is a collection in two BIG volumes of Sondheim's Broadway Lyrics (with commentary) going right back to the beginning.

For a fanatic like me who can recite the lyrics from memory, the treat here is Sondheim's little asides, commentary and anecdotes about the creative process and working with (and learning from) the likes of Bernstein,("West Side Story") Julie Styne and Jerry Robbins, ("Gypsy") among others.

It's like being in the back room while the bakers are baking, adding in this ingredient, changing that one, trying this, rejecting that. If all you know is the finished pie it can be eye-opening.

Sondheim also gives us some well observed sketches of writers like Noel Coward, Larry Hart and others who Sondheim admires - or doesn't admire -- and that is a mini course in the history of the Broadway musical that would be quite remarkable all by itself. For good measure, he gives a clinic on do's and don'ts on writing for the theatre. Or just writing.

Lyrics he changed to please Merman or Bernadette Peters or even Richard Rodgers himself. Lyrics he liked and lyrics that can still make him wince, even to this day.

(Would a semi literate Puerto Rican Shop Girl like Maria really sing "I Feel Pretty and Witty and Bright!" Well maybe not.)

It's a big book with sometimes tiny type that had me getting out the magnifying glass.

But it was worth it to hear the voice of a man I deeply admire and understand a little bit of his process and his struggle. "Art isn't Easy" as he says on one of his songs. In some ways he is his own harshest critic. But that's OK because I'm his biggest fan.

Richly rewarding. Loved it.

Bit by bit, putting it together...
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art.
Every moment makes a contribution,
Every little detail plays a part.
Having just the vision's no solution,
Everything depends on execution, Putting it together,
that's what counts.
-- Stephen Joseph Sondheim

Happy New Year, Jim. I like that Sondheim lyric. I’ve become a pretty big fan in my later years. How great that you have those lyric collections. They would be “project books” for me, ones where I read a little bit each day. My current project book is The Iliad - the new Emily Wilson translation.

>13 magicians_nephew: I can relate to that!

Thanks for stopping by, Joe. Good to see you in these parts.

Wow! my little thread was deemed popular enough to attract spammers? I suppose I should feel honored

Alistair Maclean is the King of the Big Bang Bangs - books like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra among many others. He likes to blow things up.

In each a wry taciturn hero sets out on a deadly mission and does one incredible feat of derring-do after another, each more "over the top" than the last. They're not cartoon-y like the James Bond movies. They're action adventure -- and the good guys win.

So I thought i would go back and read his first ever novel HMS Ulysses and you know maybe it was a mistake.

It's about a ship during World War II on the convoy run from Halifax to Russia, sailing above the Arctic Circle in merciless cold and wind, the crew's exhausted and bitter, and just for fun there is a German pack of submarines trying to take them out.

And they pile on the misery and the hardship until you want to weep and characters you've come to like start dying in heart-stopping ways. It's hard to read.

He gets the details right, of course. But you know, maybe the more realistic a book like this is, the less you can just hang back and enjoy it.

B Plus as history but C Minus as entertainment, I'm sorry to say.

But every writer takes a while to find his feet, and this writer did too.

"There are no winners in war --- only survivors"
-- Jake Fulton

Welcome back, Jim!

Thanks for stopping by Rachel. Missed you guys.

One of my favorite kind of books are the ones where the author invites you in, sits you down, pours you a drink and then hits you over the head with a large croquet mallet.

Submitted for your approval: Trust a book that starts out in a whisper and then builds gradually into an avalanche.

The first part is a rather proper, well-made story of a man with an understanding of economics but not much else, who sets out with his narrow understanding and builds a financial empire. Along the way he marries, and his wife becomes an important philanthropist, then falls ill and despite the best efforts of everyone, dies.

When I got this far I was ready to put the book aside and go read Hopalong Cassidy

But then we hear the same story -- or is it? -- told from different points of view, with different axes to grind, and learn more, -- or do we? -- about this man and his wife and his life. And her life.

It's an amazing achievement for one writer to write so clearly and richly in so many different voices, and test your sympathies, and make you challenge what you know and what you think you know. If you have enough money, you can tell the story the way YOU want to tell it. Or maybe not.

Not an easy milkshake to get a straw into but in the end, I think well worth the effort. I loved it. (Bong!)

“The first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can’t get out. He can’t say “meanwhile, back at the ranch” as a transition because he is imprisoned inside the narrator. But so is the reader! The reader does not see that the governess is the villainess because what the governess sees is all the reader ever sees.”
― Robert M. Persig

>22 magicians_nephew: - Trust has been on and off my mental TBR ever since it came out. Your comments have put it back on.

Just to take a minute to celebrate Melanie (Safka) who died this week at age 76.



She sang at Woodstock with just her guitar and wowed the place. (Her song about Woodstock was called "Lay Down(Candle in the Rain)".
She sang fierce powerful songs like "Beautiful People".
She sang witty sexy songs like "Brand New Key".

Even in retirement she wrote and sang and her voice was always clear and sweet and so uniquely her. A woman of peace and a woman of grace. Saw her a few times in person at Folk City and other places. Have her albums. Gonna miss her.

She sounds like a wonderful musician.

>24 magicians_nephew: I love the song Brand New Key. She will be remembered.

Hi Jim!! I found you!! Hoping this year is a much better year. And I love The Shy Stegosaurus up top. : )

>6 magicians_nephew: I immediately went to my library and requested “The Shy Stegosaurus”! And there’s a The Shy Stegosaurus of Indian Springs, published seven years later. Both will be coming my way. Thanks!

Karen O

>24 magicians_nephew: I will always remember her for 'Alexander Beetle'.

>27 Berly: KIM! Great to see you here!

>28 klobrien2: Yes the second Shy Stegosaurus is same Stegosaurus but different kids - or kid. But it's still a good one - hope you enjoy it.

>29 FAMeulstee: Thanks for stopping by, Anita!



My college girlfriend gave me a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit when we graduated.

I still have it. Thanks to all my friends who helped me to become Real.

Just a word about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store which everybody seems to have their noses in this month.

It's a big book about the doings of the Jewish and Black communities in the small town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in the 1930's and years after.

It's mostly the tale of Miss Chona, a Jewish woman with a handicap and a big heart, and later Dodo, a young Black Man with a handicap and a big heart, and how they go through life and help each other and are helped by the different complex relationships and rough-hewn bargains among the downtrodden and much sinned against Blacks and Jews.

The author has stories to tell about the people of both communities and some of them are good as anything you will read today. Stories about music and money, and food, and sharing, and murder and betrayal, and gossip over the back fence and secrets only reluctantly told.

But there's an awful lot of them, and it's easy to lose the mainline of the book, which even the author seems to do a few times. When everybody is talking at the same time, it's hard to hear anybody clearly.

And the ending, which is mostly the tale of Dodo, is both horrific and sort of not to be believed - a fairy tale ending. Happily ever after. The End. Is it going to be THAT kind of a book?

Liked a lot of the parts but not the sum of the whole. McBride knows whereof he speaks, and his memoir The Color of Water also casts a net profitably in these waters.
Maybe you're better off reading that.

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
-- Tim O'Brian

Poor Things is out as a movie now and I thought i would give it another look (I had read it years ago).

It's a strange wondrous book, an author's labor of love and more than a little over the top.

It purports to be a memoir of a medical student who met a unworldly unsociable doctor -- ok -- and tucked into the memoir is the wild and woolly story of a woman named Bella who (may have) been sewn together a la Frankenstein to have an adult woman's body and the tabla rasa mind of a child. So she sets out and we experience the modern world (of the 1880's?) through her eyes. Sort of a female "Candide", with money and agency two rare qualities of a woman in that century.

So she has comic adventures and has sex (a lot!) and travels the world with her sort of gigolo husband, and then returns to Glasgow for more alarms and revelations.

It's a fun book and I enjoyed a lot of it. The problem is that most of the characters are just garish painted dolls out of a Punch and Judy show, and it's hard to care about them and their doings very much. And the satire is sort of sat-tired - not the cool scalpel of Bernard Shaw but more the pig's bladder of Bozo the Clown. And maybe you won't be as gobsmacked about the unfairness of the cruel cold world as the author would like you to be.

The book was written in the 1980's believe it or not though it works hard to present like a Victorian epistolary novel with letters and diary entries like Dracula or some of Jules Verne. There are woodblock illustrations. OK.

I enjoyed it for what it was. But after all the noise and to do, there may be less here than meets the eye.

Looking forward to the movie.

And the moral of that is?. . .
-- Lewis Carroll

>19 magicians_nephew: Ha Jim, I thought the same thing when there were spammers on my thread.

Thanks for the review of Trust, I have the book but haven't read it - like too many others taking up space in my home. I picked it up because of an LT review but I'm not clear about why at this point. Thanks for making my acquisition more understandable.

>33 Familyhistorian: Trust is a good 'um, Meg. I'm looking forward to hearing what you (and Katie) make of it.



Taking notice that unreliable narrators don't just turn up in fiction - sometimes you find them on every street corner.

Denis Johnson's little book Train Dreams really sneaks up on you. The language is spare and hard like a hard wood railroad tie, the writing is back woods poetry chanted to the sound of a far away whistle, casual and off hand but also precise and just-the-right-word-my-God in ways that just snatches the breath out of you.

It's the story of a man ageless, fatherless, almost nameless growing up in the Pacific Northwest, working as a laborer on some big engineering projects and living his life at home with and sometimes at odds the world and nature around him. Life and death are his nearest neighbors.

There are great hardships and small joys and we see a man who has learned to take what life gives him, without complaining, with acceptance. We learn about him as much by what he doesn't say as by what he does. Lovely well drawn characters pop up and disappear as quickly as telegraph poles flash by outside the boxcar doors.

The ending is a mystery - or a mysticism. You're either gonna like it or hate it. Trains take us from here to there and back again. Maybe that's all there is.

Now a traveler under the gray-black winter sky
I've come to find a gathering of eagles.
Not for the sake of mingling with the great birds.
But only to justify a thousand streets walked end to end.
Ten thousand evenings spent listening to the small sounds of the night
in station after station.
-- Rod McKuen

>35 magicians_nephew: Terrific review of Train Dreams”! I read the book a few years ago and gave it 5 stars, so I guess I liked it a lot! 8>) Might be time for a reread. Thanks!

Karen O

>34 magicians_nephew: I sometimes take a while to pick up on unreliable narrators since I approach a book with the assumption that the narrator is reliable. It takes a pretty obviously unreliable narrator for me to notice, I ashamedly admit.

>34 magicians_nephew: Good one!! LOL.

>37 The_Hibernator: I am with you on not quickly recognizing unreliable narrators. Also, I don't run across them very often, so I am not immediately suspicious in general. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it! ; )

>35 magicians_nephew: Agreed Jim, that one is much weightier than the sum of its words which are few!

Thanks for stopping by Paul. It's good to see you.

There are books and there are bagatelles. Muriel Spark has written some really amazing books, including my two favorites The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and it's sort-of-sequel Girls of Slender Means.

But one fine day she sat down and wrote Not to Disturb which is barely a hundred pages and is about half witty fun and half pain in the ass cynicism.

We start out in media res in a chateau in Switzerland. The Baron and the Baroness are closeted in the library (with orders NOT TO DISTURB) and the butler and (very pregnant) housemaid and other spear carriers are huddled in the servants hall, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So it's like a murder mystery right out of Dame Agatha (or a mad game of "Clue") but with characters that even when they are totally annoying, are fun to watch and hang out with.

Or it's 'Waiting for Godot" where Godot will be the police coming to sweep up the mess the next morning. And there will be a mess in the morning.

Probably a book, dare i say it, that was more fun to write than it was to read. But even as you snort or gasp or try to catch the plot fading into the ether, you know you're in good hands with Spark. The lady can write. But you knew that.

Now I think perhaps we are ready to begin?
-- Philip Roth

Hi Jim! Hope this finds you well and happy.

>21 magicians_nephew: Excellent quote. I have and have read Enough Rope and a contemporary fiction I gave 4* to, Farewell, Dorothy Parker. And, unread, her complete essays and a biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?.

>22 magicians_nephew: I’ve been reading dual-POV novels frequently for the last year or so and most of them are successful at keeping the voice of each clear and not compromised. These are not great literature, mind, but I’ll take the good parts of a book where I can find them.

>24 magicians_nephew: Brand New Key lyrics immediately came into my head, almost complete, definitely in her voice.

>31 magicians_nephew: My copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, from the 1970s, is still on my shelves, read many, many times.

Thank for stopping by, Karen.

Don't mean to make this this obituary column around here but i have to tell you about Ramona Fradon who died this week at the age of 97.



Ramona was a comic book artist at a time when there were just not very many women comic book artists. And she she was so freaking GOOD that male artists admired her work and went out of their way to work with her on her projects. She was the master of composition and framing and detail and other things. She drew women who looked like women, not soft core male fantasy.

I have a daily Brenda Starr strip she drew and autographed for me years ago. But I'd rather show you a little panel she drew last year as a commission.



The Art of Ramona Fradon is a good place to start getting to know this remarkable artist.

And she was a great laugher, too

Thanks Ramona.

Hi Jim!! Hope your week is going well. I am not familiar with Ramona, but I like the cartoon you posted. Sorry she is gone.

Hi Jim!

Ramona Fradon sounds like an interesting cartoonist, Jim. I'm not sure if I've seen anything that she has drawn besides the image on your thread.

If your newspaper ran comic strips you undoubtedly saw her work on "Brenda Starr" and others.

She is mostly know for work on the "Aquaman" backup stories for DC and creating the minor character "Metamorpho"

Masters of the Air is running on one of the streaming services and it took me back to the fine book that came out a few years ago.

It's a fascinating story of the American airmen who flew bombing raids against Nazi Germany during World War II.

The British liked to run night bombing raids, which missed the targets A LOT, but had the advantage that the bombing crews came home, more often than not.

The Americans favored daylight raids, which they thought would have a better chance of you know, actually hitting the target. But the loss of life was horrible. and the missions, fiercely harassed by German fighters, really not much more effective than the British ones.

If you ever read Catch-22 you may get some of the flavor of this. You had to fly 25 missions before you could be sent home. One in five missions didn't come back. You do the math.

There are stories of incredible bravery and ingenuity here, in some most unlikely men , but mostly they hammer the bottom line: These missions cost many many lives, and accomplished very very little. Only late in the war, when the flower of the Luftwaffe was sent to fight in Russia, did the bombers have a chance of being effective.

The home front was told their boys were winning the war. By and large it wasn't true. They say Truth is the first casualty of war. The airmen of the "Bloody 100th" knew who the casualties were - knew them by name. We should know them too.

Just a footnote: Targeting and killing civilians was seen as acceptable even strategic in this campaign. Civilians worked in the factories that made the guns that kept the war going. Bombing civilians was seen then as now as a way to shorten the war. Sometimes history ain't pretty.

Recommended.

War is all Hell and you cannot change it.
-- William Tecumseh Sherman

.

This statue can be found at the University of Maryland, Jim Henson's alma mater.

This is how I always picture Jim and Kermit the frog talking things over together

Wanted to say a few words about Fates and Furies a new novel that our book group took a look at last month.

It's the story of Lotto (AKA Lancelot, if you're playing at home) who starts out a goofy sort of charming rich kid and marries a girl he meets in college after only knowing her a few days.

His mother cuts him off, for reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, and he drifts for a while as a not-very-good actor until he finds out he can write plays and make money writing them. His wife supports him through thin and thick, and is otherwise kind of a background character we don't get to know much about. That's the Fates part. OK.

Then in the second half of the book we hear from the wife, who has her own back story of guilt and abuse and neglect, and a ton of resentment over the role she has chosen to play (was forced to play?) for so many years. Her vengeance is epic in scope and "Fury".

But I dunno. If these two people just, you know, talked to each other, much of the book would just not have to happen.

And just too many times when the author kicks the television and adds a plot twist just for the hell of it. And the ending was all fire, flood and devastation and maybe just a leetle bit over the top.

A book that you read and shake your head and then put aside. That ain't good.

Your mileage may vary.

The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars
but in ourselves, that we are underlings
-- Shakespeare

Having a good time listening to (as opposed to reading) an old favorite of mine, Gore Vidal's Burr.

It's a mischievous well researched book that take a look back (from supposed memoirs of the infamous "Traitor" Aaron Burr) to the early days of our American Republic.

Vidal (with Burr as his mouthpiece) has a lot of interesting things to say about the founders and the framers, some of whom were much more human and fallible than the grey marble busts that adorn our schoolrooms.

Burr talks knowingly about Washington's many military disasters and admires his canny "political" skill to have his name seen as the victor in many conflicts where Lee or Greene might rightly have claimed the laurels. And Jefferson's "inventions" some of which were seen as pretty goofy even in those days.

And for those who think our fair land is now hopelessly gridlocked by factions and tribalism, and violence and scandal, well my dear ones, guess what - it was always that way.

Note that no one in those days had the least problem calling an ex-VICE President to account in a criminal trial. No immunity. Trumpsters take note.

It's just that real history isn't always how they teach it at the Little Red Schoolhouse - or at Harvard. But Vidal is careful of his facts - and they're worth listening to.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if Lin-Manual Miranda had picked up a copy of this book, instead of Ron Chernow's Hamilton when he was casting around for a subject for a new play.

If you read this one go right on and read Vidal's Lincoln which is almost as good. Witty and fascinating and highly recommended.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
And the fear that it might be true
-- Gore Vidal

If you're going to sit down and read a history book, sometimes it's useful to read two at once - just to get the "on the other hand" point of view.

So while I was chucking my way though Burr I also was enjoying Stacy Schiff's Samuel Adams which i picked up last year when the author was in town on book tour.

Sam Adams was an eloquent and important voice in the movement for independence in America, but sometimes historians tend to downplay his role. One of the reasons was lack of material: Sam ordered his family to burn his papers on his death.

But we have a lot of what other people - his cousin John for example - said about him, and we have his published writings, which made independence from the Crown palatable, even welcome, among his New England neighbors still yearning for some kind of accommodation with the Empire, and its enough to make a sounding.

Sam saw clearly that independence was the way to go, and his writings and his actions all moved in that direction. (He was a major player in the "Boston Tea Party" demonstration).

Jefferson reading Adams in Virginia thought his voice was the strongest and clearest in the cause of liberty. High praise.

FWIW, I can find no evidence that Samuel Adams ever brewed beer in any quantity, or that Samuel Adams ever met Aaron Burr. (Though Burr certainly knew Adams' writing)

After the war he went back to Massachusetts and was elected governor and largely faded from the national stage.

Schiff is not an eloquent writer, but she has done her research, and she tells the Adams story warmly, with lots of lovely side glances at revolutionary America. I learned a lot.

Recommended.

It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
-- Samuel Adams

Found this on Facebook - my childhood revolved around my local library

Taking a break from American History I picked up a copy of The Wars of the Roses by Dan Jones.

This is the history that every British schoolboy is forced to plod through, and generally learns to loathe.

If you teach the people qua people this is a fascinating period of English History, but if you just do the battles and the beheadings this can be a bit of a slog.

Jones' book is alas much more the latter than the former. and it's hard sledding. Keeping track of the Nevilles and the Stanleys and who is up and who is down isn't much fun. Will probably put it aside DNF and pick up Alison Weirs much better telling instead.

History is the bunk
-- Henry Ford

>53 magicians_nephew: I got more out of Dan Jone's The Wars of the Roses than you did but then I've always had an interest in these conflicts and wanted to get a better idea of the play book.

>46 magicians_nephew: Newspapers here did run comic strips but never "Brenda Starr". She's a new old character to me.

I prefer social histories to battle histories, too. Battles bore me.

I am not a big fan of history books, but my RL Bookclub is reading The Wolves at the Door, the story of a highly successful female spy in WW2 and I am actually enjoying it!

Sometimes its good to dance around a fire and celebrate the spring

Hi Jim!

Hurray for spring!! Hope you enjoyed May Day, Jim. : )

Not seen you around for more than a month, Jim, and I hope all is well buddy.
>57 magicians_nephew: I miss some of the old British celebrations like Guy Fawkes night.

All right fess up how many Brazilian novels have you read this year? And how many written over a century ago?

Our Book Club took a look at The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and I'll bet you a cruzeiro you've never heard of it. But it sparked a deep and lively discussion.

A book written in 1881 narrated by a man in his coffin who had a rather checkered career among the minor nobility of Brazil in the previous century.

Being dead, he has no reason to lie to anybody and his memoir is full of choice observations about the people and the country he knew. Colonial Brazil at the dying edge of the Empire. Irony and sarcasm -- jokes and regret. A rich tapestry. The rich are very different from you and me, well no they're not.

Breaking the fourth (Coffin?) wall and alternately scolding and encouraging his readers in witty asides.

There is chapter written entirely in ellipses (... ... ...) Just keep going.

And now i discovery that this book from the dim dusty end of the library steppes has become a HUGE TikTok meme and point of discussion among the young 'uns. You can sort of see why -- Short pithy comments, loads of snark , loads of sarcasm -- its not a book it's a Blog!

And it's recommended. Go!

The Rediscovery of Bras Cubas

and they
since they were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs
-- Robert Frost --

>61 magicians_nephew:,I read that one last year. I liked it !

>62 Kristelh: Thanks for stopping by, Kristel.

Just curious - how did you happen to hear about "Bras Cubas"?

It is one of the books on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Probably because it represents Brazil. Considered a Brazilian classic. I've also read Dom Casmurro, also by de Assis and also on the list.

Pooh is my spirit animal

>65 magicians_nephew: Love your Pooh picture and quote!

Karen O

>65 magicians_nephew: : )

>65 magicians_nephew: so cute!

We get "Britbox" a nice little streaming service that offers binge-able classic British detective shows for us to watch.

They have the cozies like "Father Brown" and the real hard core police procedurals like "Silent Witness", and and some deliciously uncatagorizable stuff like "Jonathan Creek', a quirky magician detective, which is a favorite of mine.

But we love to watch "Vera" now in its 12th season which involves a older woman detective, frumpy and stubborn and not always likeable, who solves crimes with her team in coastal England. Old family secrets are uncovered, and there are many dark trails to follow, before the big reveal at the end.

I got my mitts on The Crow Trap the first in the series, and i am here to tell you well that i DNF'ed it around page 220. (which I may point out is less than halfway through the book!)

Slow moving as you won't believe and atmosphere laid on like mud, and too many characters, and nothing happens!!!!! Nothing! When I departed there has been a mysterious disappearance but no murder and Vera has not yet put in an appearance. So I put it down.

Of course in the TV show Vera appears almost immediately and we have her strong tart personality to entertain us which the murder machine gets up to speed. Not so in the books.

I may give a later in the series book a try one of these days. but this one is just -- not -- good

Your mileage may vary.

"You look at these scattered houses and are impressed by their beauty. I look at them and the only thought which comes to me is the isolation and the impunity with which foul crimes may be committed there"
-- Conan Doyle

>69 magicians_nephew: As you know, I'm a deep aficionado of Vera Stanhope mysteries, and I did finish The Crow Trap. I do agree with you about the long setup, but

"Cleeves takes her time setting up all the characters, leaving only the merest, uncomplimentary traces of Vera until half-way through the book. The first dialog with her characters is so much like the TV dialog it made me laugh. We get a lot of everyone's backstory first, mixed in with the first death, and then the first murder. Lots of red herrings, of course. I did enjoy it, and will follow the series to see if the narrative pattern holds, or if Vera becomes more the center of the stories in the future".

I read the next one, Telling Tales, but all my notes say is that it's very good. Sorry to lack details, but I seem to remember Vera shows up earlier in this one.

If you talk about "Topper" some people will recall the 1937 movie with a very young Cary Grant and Constance Bennett playing a playful society couple turned into ghosts before their time, who devote their (after) life to teasing and shaking up their stuffy and much repressed old banker friend, Cosmo Topper.

It was made into a TV show in the 1950's with primitive but pretty good special effects and the wonderful Leo G. Carroll as the title character.

But for me Topper will always be the gloriously witty and funny "Ribald Adventure" novel of the 1930's. Now it comes across as not "ribald" but sweet and innocent and really sometimes laugh out loud funny. The heart of the book is the love between George and Marion, and the love the two of them show again and again for poor old Topper.

Puts a smile on your face. Truly.



It fell out of the bookshelf this week and i read it (again). Even the sequel Topper Takes a Trip is pretty good though it's really just more of the same. But light and whimsical and funny. And sweet.

Good times

“you know, love really matters, friends really matter, family really matters. Being responsible and healthy and disciplined really matters.”
-- thorne Smith

a cartoonists in joke from Facebook. It tickled me.

Very good.

>73 weird_O: Thanks for stopping by, Bill.



some days waiting on line for something just feels like this

Just a few words perhaps about James the new novel by a distinguished Black Writer that is framed to tell the story of "Jim", the Negro slave who accompanied Huck down river in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

It's a dark book that displays real insight into the horrors of slavery, the helplessness, the endless toil, the hunger, the loss of personhood.

But I'm not sure it works - and I'm not sure why not.

The story is (pretty much) the story that Twain tells. Jim, fearful of being sold south, runs away. Huck, fearful of "Pap Finn" runs away with him. The Raft. The King and the Duke. The Feud. OK

There are some lovely passages in this - where Jim is (too briefly) picked up by a (white) traveling Minstrel Show (and is almost picked up by a White Woman) and when Jim travels briefly on a nightmare riverboat bound (maybe) for the free states. Is there anybody up there? Or does slavery just exist, somehow as a thing independent of anything else?

Huck is a pretty minor character in this, and rather less than the resourceful quick witted hero of the other book. But OK.

A word here about "Code-switching" Jim and the other enslaved characters have learned the trick of speaking one way to their Masters, and quite another way when only Negro people are present. This is certainly a real phenomenon of marginalized groups. But Jim and his family speak so formally and perfectly, with impeccable grammar and a rich vocabulary, that it just becomes an author's stunt - and it's distracting. I'm OK with the idea that Jim taught himself to read by hanging around Judge Thatcher's library - I'm less OK with the idea that Jim is visited by the ghosts of Locke and Voltaire and others. But there it is.

There is a Big Reveal in the third and final book of the novel, which I will not spoil here, except to say that it is (a) unnecessary (b) really unfair to the reader and (c) untrue to the characters in the story as presented. It's just firecrackers. Really didn't like it.

Jim's anger - and Jim's giving himself permission to FEEL anger -- are the twin arcs that drive this book - but they don't really GO anywhere. And even Jim realizes that changing his name from "Jim" to "James" (or crossing the river into Iowa) isn't going to solve anything.

Seems to me that Mister Mark Twain wrote him a pretty good anti-slavery book too - maybe a better one than this one. You might give it a try. This one didn't work for me.

“Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?”
-- Mark Twain

Just a word about Myra Breckenridge that I read many years ago and recently re-read for a Book Group.

Myra -- cool, glamorous, impossibly sexy and improbably untouchable -- comes to Hollywood from who knows where to take over the place. She wants Money, and Power! She meets people and has adventures and then there is a shocking Reveal. The End.

When I read it back in the day I thought it was the coolest book ever! about sex and Hollywood and politics and stuff like that there. Golly Gee. What did I know?.

It was easy to guess who was who in the roman a clef plot and that sort of added to the wicked fun.

SEX = POWER but not for women?

MONEY = POWER but watch your bottom line?

YOUTH = POWER but watch the calendar?

Vidal knows the film industry as well as he knows Washington politics, and some of this book is still laugh out loud funny. And some of it gasp out loud true!

And some of it is sort of tired and obvious, like boys passing around a copy of Playboy in the back of the candy store.

Submitted for your approval: a bright shiny object from a bygone day. And Vidal can write. But Bye! and Be Gone! at least for this reader. And at least for today.

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
-- Erika Jong

>75 magicians_nephew: Interesting comments. Reading this one in September for my bookclub and I am planning to reread Huckleberry Finn this month. We'll see...!

Happy August! Oh, and I love your cartoon posts. ; )

>78 Berly: Hi Kim! Nice to see you in these parts.

Happy New Month!

A good companion piece to James might be A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass -- some of the descriptions of slavery in James have echoes in the "My Bondage - My Freedom" sections.

Be curious to hear what your book group makes of James

After the glamour and tawdry sex of "Myra" I needed a change of scene.

How about Montenegro?

The Black Mountain is one of my favorite Nero Wolfe books for a lot of reasons.

Wolfe's oldest friend is killed by a foreign assassin and Wolfe and Archie trek the hills and valleys of far off Yugoslavia to catch him.

It's exciting to see Wolfe and Archie out of their New York City comfort zone and into some serious hardships and real danger.

It may be the only book in the series where Wolfe hunts a murderer not for a client and a fee but for personal vengeance. It makes a difference.

The real pleasure here is to see behind the banter and the grumbling, how much Wolfe and Archie really care about each other and want to look out for each other. It's a side of these guys you don't often see.

If the murder is solved pretty quickly, well you don't read Nero Wolfe for the plots. But these books are gloriously re-readable. and I re-read this one this week.

As Wolfe might say "Satisfactory".

This is a series where the protagonist is a hitman? Is he an antihero?

>81 The_Hibernator: No the series is just the story of a private detective working in New York with many funny curious personality quirks.

The later novels are almost comic character "cosy's" but the earlier books in the series are more psychological crime novels.

This one sort of comes down in the middle

These are fun to say out loud with the emphasis on the second syllable. Something I found on Facebook.

>83 magicians_nephew: That's a fun list

>84 elorin: Thanks for dropping Robyn.

Been out of action for a few days with a banged up right hand that made keyboarding difficult. Amazing how cut off from the world it made me feel - not only LT but other emails and sites and services I contribute to. Feeling strangely silenced.

My book group took a look at The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and while i had read it before it was a treat to hear its unique voice again.

Christopher is a teen age boy in small town England who is "on the Spectrum" and all that. That means he sees the world through a different lens than you or I, a narrower lens, perhaps, but a clear lens too. He has rules he lives by and processes he follows, and the book is wonderful about letting you discover how his mind works. He's good at maths.

The neighbor woman's dog is killed, shockingly, and Christopher decides to turn detective and find out what happened.

To do this he must step out of his comfort zone and take risks, and go into danger, to get where he wants to go. And he learns a few things. And things change.

And perhaps we can see in Christopher a mirror for all of us, and the rules we have and the steps we take (and don't take) . We all have Good Days and Bad Days, and people we like and people we like to avoid. Maybe we're all detectives, trying to solve the puzzles that come into our lives.

They turned it into a dazzling theatre piece a few years back that really showed Christopher confused and frightened but also strong and determined. Breath taking.

and recommended.

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident,"
-- Conan Doyle

Edward Hopper is the painter who paints New York in all its beauty and loneliness.



One of my favorites

Just catching up with a few things - sore finger and all.

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy is twisty tricky meta-fiction riffing on the old fashioned hard-boiled detective novel.

In three interconnected novellas, he calls the changes expertly: a shady dame sends a shopworn detective (who may be Paul Auster himself) out on the mean streets to shadow a suspect, who may be the woman's husband. But the author-detective gets more interested in the mean streets and the process than in his subject, and matters sort of sort of peter out.

The second and third case begin very much to the formula, but soon shear off in other curious and surprising directions to tell other surprising stories.

Auster is a terrific writer, and the prose here is top notch.

But he seems to have gotten lost, even as his hero did, and the ending is sort of a fireworks display to conceal the fact that not much is really going on.

Enjoyed reading but not sure what the heck it was about, all in all

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of Order.
P. J. James

Just for a quick DNF a rare DNF for me.

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels started out well. Twenty years ago in a small town in England, a group of kids decide that they are a cult of "Angels", and proceed to commit a couple of messy murders. But that's all in the past.

In the current day a couple of nosy reporters are hot on the trail of a baby born twenty years ago to a girl of the angels, who may or may not be the Antichrist. And we're off.

The story is told in what i would have called an "Epistolary" style, except in this it's all not letters and diaries but text messages and "messages found in a bottle" and WhatsApp DM's flying back and forth. OK.

But halfway through the book nothing much has happened except a hint at an authorial red herring, and there's too many characters and hard to keep up with who's who. So I put it aside perhaps for another day. The author has done a few books in this style and people seem to like them. This wasn't my cup of tea.

Moving on.

"For the Snark WAS a Boojum, you see"
-- Lewis Carroll

Hey, Jim. I agree with you about the Thorne Smith Topper books. I enjoyed those two so much that I tried others by him. Didn’t work, unfortunately.

I was surprised that James A Novel didn’t work for you. It’s my book of the year so far. The bang bang fit for me and didn’t throw me off. I’m sorry to hear you had such a different experience with it.

I saw that terrific play adaptation of Curious Incident in your fine city. Because so much of the book was his interior monologue, I didn’t think that they could pull it off. But they sure did. An outstanding theater experience.

That Brazilian book sounded good and interesting. I lost my place with you discussion of it. What was the title again?

I hope things are going well for you and Judy.

Thanks for stopping by, Joe.

I was probably too hard on James in my comments above. For me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the ur text the American novel from which all other American novels have sprung. So anybody who tries to stick an oar into that water is going to meet some resistance from me.

Wish the author had given Huck some agency and autonomy, and included perhaps one white person in the story who was not cruel, and/or venal and/or stupid.

But it's not Huck's book. And there's a lot to like here too. So.

The Brazilian book that is getting a lot of attention lately is The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas which our book group enjoyed the heck out of. Really out there at spots but funny and fascinating.

The Rediscovery of Bras Cubas

Be curious to know what you make of it, if you pick it up.

And all good wishes and happy thoughts for Debbi too

Someone posted this on Facebook. My first home computer had a 20 MB Hard drive AND Bill Gates' new-fangled MS-DOS operating system, But was otherwise the rig this ad is offering. And no MODEM or LAN access.

I have to sit down now.

James Baldwin was one of the great public intellectuals of his century. He wrote passionately and elegantly about race and politics at a time when the Essay was still a thing. He is still read, I think mostly because of that.

But there are his novels too. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's book, fierce and loud and angry about racism and poverty and class struggle in America.

But then there is Giovanni's Room and it's different. It's not about race it's about sex and social pressures and biases against homosexuality. David, a young (White) American writer who is still struggling to define himself escapes America to live in France, and discovers the underground society of gay men in Paris. It's a love-hate relationship.

Though he is sort of engaged to an America girl, Helas, he falls in love and moves in with Giovanni, a gay bartender at a local club.

It's curious that the anger here about how gay man are put down and pushed out of French Society, is muted, almost tentative. The anger in this book is different, softer, and and times self directed.

Being homosexual was still against the law in American and other places , too. We are a long way from the days of Gay Pride parades, here.

It reminded me a lot of I am a Camera with the lead character observing more than acting, watching more than doing.

The writing is lovely and spare and calls to mind Hemingway's writing about bars in Paris a generation earlier. You can smell the cheap tobacco smoke and taste the cognac.

The ending is sort of out of Becket = "I can't go on -- I'll go on". David is still David. The world is as it was.

A small book that contains multitudes on every page.

“We ain't what we oughta be.
We ain't what we gonna be.
But, thank God, we ain't what we was.”
-- Martin Luther King

Thanks for the notes on James Baldwin. I didn't know all that. I just had heard his name, and that's it.

>93 The_Hibernator: Rachel. I'm glad i was able to bring his work to your attention. His is an important American Voice.

To Be Black and Gay was to walk down two very difficult roads, in post war America.

The best novel is the deeply moving Go Tell It On The Mountain

But think his best writing is still the essay collection The Fire Next Time. Dated perhaps but still very much worth the read.

Just a word about Michael Chabon, truly one of America's finest wliving riters.

Of course the book everyone talks about is the Pulitzer The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. But he's not a one trick pony.

My Book group took a look at Moonglow and it's a mini-masterpiece. The narrator who is an author named "Mike" goes to see his cranky old grandfather who is on his deathbed and wants to talk.

We hear the old man's stories of living through the twentieth center and World War II and prison and running a business and living into the space age and growing old and meeting people and having adventures.

There are just no minor characters in this book -- every person has a story to tell and a unique voice to tell it with. And amazingly it all ties together.

Like a lot of people Grandfather admires the American Mission to the Moon, and like a lot of people Grandfather is disgusted by Werner Von Braun whose remarkable work on the program almost but not quite made up for the horror of his Nazi past.

Grandfather has a skill of making miniatures, building perfect models out of scraps and junk that show amazing details of landscapes and scenery and light and shadow.

His grandson has the same skill as a writer.

Highly recommended.

“That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old..”
-- Phillip Pullman

A new book I've been enjoying is The Princes in The Tower by Phillipa Langley about the mysterious deaths of the Young Princes heirs to Edward IV and the reign of Richard III.

Of course Ive been a "Richard Didn't Do it" man since I first read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

(and years later Sharon Kay Penman's richly detailed novel of Richard's all too brief reign. The Sunne in Splendor)

But this new book is non-fiction and the product of a group of serious researchers as part of "The Princes Project". There's been a lot of new material dug about about the period and the players that Tey and even Penman didn't have.

Laid out chronologically and in great detail (with lovely asides), this is a brief for the defense that will be hard to knock down.

Richard's body amazingly was dug up recently from under a parking lot in rural England. Perhaps his reputation as a good King, Uncle and Husband is overdue for some rediscovery , too

And Boo! Hiss! To Henry VII!

I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as it was said to me.
-- Walter Scott

This made me laugh. Talk about a fish out of water!

>96 magicians_nephew: I always figured it was him, because he's a villain in Shakespeare

>99 The_Hibernator: Yes but even Shakespeare can only be as good as his sources.

Whether Richard III was a history play or a tragedy has always been subject to debate.

>80 magicians_nephew: Nero and Archie actually go to a foreign country? That sounds interesting.

>96 magicians_nephew: I read Philippa Langley's The King's Grave about the discovery of Richard III's burial place. The search was intriguing, so much so that when I was in England I followed up on the story by going to Leicester. Richard III's resting place is now in Leicester Cathedral.

One of the joys of living in New York is that there are alwsys interesting talks to go to and interesting people to hear. Kathryn Hahn is one of those actors that are in everything, comedies, dramas and everything else and is always good often great and sometimes just amazing. .

Two Years ago she made a splash as a witch in Disney/Marvel's Wandavision and now she is back starring in her own show Agatha All Along .

Was fun to hear her speak and talk about her career and the new projects and whats happening. She's a funny witty charming speaker, with a great story. Can't wait to see what the new show will be about. Patti LuPone, Audrey Plaza and others as witches!

The Agatha theme song is earworming in my head. I can't wait.

Don't like to post too much political stuff on here but this was just too good not to pass along.

The Project 2025 Song

>103 magicians_nephew: That was great! Thanks for posting!

Karen O

Our book group had a look at We Have Always Lived In The Castle and while i had red it before it still seemed new and strange to me.

Two sisters live alone in the big house behind the iron gates near the village. They are hated and feared because one of them may have way back in the past murdered all the men of the family.

It's a story about being different and being an outsider, and the madness and violence inherent in crowds. Recall that Jackson also wrote The Lottery the famous short story that defined mob violence in small town New England.

This time I enjoyed the sister's connection with nature and nature magic, and the people in the village who come to tea and try to understand.

Brilliant, intricate, dazzling writing. The story and the people stick with you.

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

what Sunday in New York feels like sometimes - though not often enough

Thinking of you at this time, Jim.

Hi Jim

I hope you and Judy have a lovely day!

Happy Holidays, Jim!! : )

Hi Jim.

Quick skim. I won’t read what you wrote about James because I’ve just started it for my book club’s January discussion, but have marked it as a Favorite to go back to. Loved Topper the book, also loved Topper the movie. I need to read more about Aaron Burr and Samuel Adams.

>91 magicians_nephew: I dated a guy in the early 1980s who had an IMSAI computer. Coincidentally, I got a kitten while dating him, and named her Imsai. She and I were together much longer than Kenn and I were.

>96 magicians_nephew: Onto the wish list it goes. I’ve always loved Tey’s The Daughter of Time. I have and have read almost all of her books.