The first novel featuring the adventurer, importer, sometime gun-runner Paul Harris is not as cohesive, nor as finished as the only other I’ve read in the series (You Want To Die, Johnny?), but it rollicks around Malaya and Sumatra quite successfully, kicking off the long-running series with gunshots, plane wrecks, and hot boat on boat …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: Suddenly, At Singapore“
Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key is one of the ten best books of all time. At least in English, which is the only language I feel even the slightest competence for such judgment. (Being born and raised in Georgia, English is my second language, never having had a first.) I’d be hard-pressed to say what …
Just a short note to pay homage to a work of the hardest ‘hard’ science fiction I have read in many a moon. Mission of Gravity is that rarest of birds, a gripping adventure story on an almost impossible world, backed by meticulously calculated speculative science. The hero of the book, a wily trading captain …
“Some things are too terrible to be true,” sang Bob Dylan on the album he released September 11, 2001. Fiction was invented—in part—to resolve the paradox, to give emotional body to the merely true, to give life where the recitation of facts and history bathes its subject in a deadening radiation of memory and catalogue. …
The most noticeable thing about William Gibson’s future as seen in his 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome is just how relentlessly shiny it is. Just like the classics of 1930s Science Fiction he pretends to disdain, even the dark underbelly of his future is full of “Gee, whiz!” artifacts that take the observer’s breath …
In partial fulfillment of the promise I made to read works by the sisters of Charlotte Brontë, and in partial penance for baiting remarks I made purporting to disdain “women writers”, I have just completed Agnes Grey by the lesser Baldwin—I mean Brontë, of course—Anne Brontë, the youngest sibling of the much ballyhooed literary sisterhood. …
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a 170 year-old romance novel in which the protagonists are beautiful only on the inside, their outward unattractiveness being dunned into the reader’s poor brain at every opportunity. I have read only one other author’s romance novels heretofore — by accident (thinking they were mysteries) — and though I should …
“I Read It So You Don’t Have To” Department Doomsday: The End of the World–A View Through Time by Russell Chandler is a meandering, badly held together set of essays about human ideas and experiences with the end of all things. The book is strongest when it dives into modern Christian apocalyptic thought and history. …
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The Truth Won’t Set You Free Department I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to not read books less than a year old for two reasons, and the second is not laziness. Caligula For President proved (in both senses) the second reason, because reading this book now convulses and repulses in a way it could not …
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“I Read It So You Don’t Have To” Department I learned many things from Bound For Murder, the 3rd scrapbooking mystery in the series by the pseudonymous Laura Childs. In the end section devoted to scrapbooking tips and recipes I discovered that you can mix mango, cilantro, olive oil with red and green peppers and …
