Category: Books

Back in my eBay seller days, I bought a first edition hardback written by Manly Wade Wellman at a garage sale for next to nothing and sold it for quite a bit of scratch. So when I found another paperback by the author and tried to turn that one for some bucks. No dice. So I still have it, and here it is. So much on my to read shelves follows this pattern (see also the Chronicles of Counter Earth series and numerous Stephen King and John Saul titles). So it’s here, and now it’s read.

Manly Wade Wellman was an author in the science fiction pulps. This book includes a novel originally published in 1940 (the eponymous Twice in Time) and a bonus short story called “The Timeless Tomorrow”. It also has a brief introduction, which I thought I’d read, but I got to the point where it said “If you like surprise endings, don’t read any further.” I mean, come on, you’re going to give me the ultimate twist in the introduction because you take this author seriously as literature enough to strip that enjoyment from readers? Where does that mean you fall on the self-esteem scale, or where do you think the audience does?

So I stopped reading it, but I knew there was a surprise twist coming, so I figured out the surprise fairly early. I don’t know if I would have otherwise, but the names and the very cover gave the game away.

A modern (ca 1940) man builds a time reflector to go back to Renaissance Florence. He does and falls into the clutches of an ambitious courtier who wants to use his new “friend” in his lust for power. Together under duress, they take on the d’Medicis.

The additional short story also deals with time travel, as Nostradamus learns he cannot only see the future, but can participate in it.

The writing style is the simplistic of the pulps, but without the transcendence of Hemingway or Hammett. It reminds me of much of my early fiction and probably too much of my contemporary fiction, probably. It’s not bad, but the not bad is not a synonmym for good. And it’s really not worth an introduction that talks about the book as though it was a literary triumph with which everyone is familar, even if they haven’t read it.

That said, click the link below to buy it and send me a couple pennies for my effort.

Books mentioned in this review:

I found a pile of Ed McBain books at the Carondolet Y book fair this year, and I bought them. This book clocks in at 147 pages, so it’s more like a novella than a novel, but it was a quick read.

The book deals with Bert Kling’s marriage to the model, Augusta, and her kidnapping on their wedding night. The detectives of the 87th, along with Fat Ollie Weeks, beat the bushes, grasp the straws, work the informants, and ultimately find her just in time.

Even though I know the longer story arcs of these characters, I can still enjoy individual books pulled from the middle of the 87th Precinct series. It would be a neat endeavor to read them all in order. Someday, perhaps, when I get them all.

Sure, it’s a short review. It’s a short book. And you don’t read these anyway.

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Mark Steyn has been talking about the old James Bond books and a new book about James Bond books, so I was inspired to draw this old paperback from my shelf. It had been a while (at least two years, since there are no book reports) since I read the first three Signet paperbacks in my library (Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Diamonds Are Forever), but I liked them enough to buy a couple more when I found them at garage sales.

Thunderball is based on the screenplay of the same name, so it’s not a straight James Bond novel, I suspect. Still, the author has a lot of fun making cracks about the plot being like a B movie plot, so Fleming didn’t take it too seriously. Much like the movie Never Say Never Again didn’t take it too seriously when they remade it.

The story, for those of you who don’t know and probably don’t care, is that SPECTRE (not Spectra, that was Battle of the Planets, silly!) has stolen a plane with a couple of nukes on it and they’re going to blow them unless they get ransom. The West looks for SPECTRE and thinks about paying, but Britain sends James Bond to Bermuda just in case it’s there. It is.

A quick read (188 pages) and, apparently, a piece of British history. Shorter and more engaging than a Clancy, anyway.

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I bought this book for $3.00 from Hooked on Books. It’s gotten easier to tell, since Hooked on Books has begun marring the inside front covers with large labels attesting to the fact. It’s perhaps slightly less risable than stamping the page edges, but not much.

It’s one of MacDonald’s science fiction efforts (he calls it science fantasy, but it’s the same difference). In a world not too far in the future, after the First Atomic War, India has risen into prominence in the world, vying with Irania and Brazil for power. As tensions escalate, a United States diplomat tries to engage calm tensions, but they get to him. His assistant investigates and finds that a dark conspiracy of alien forces with psi powers are fomenting tensions on earth, and he has to discover why.

Which he does. MacDonald’s science fantasy books are somewhat less than his crime fiction, and let’s be frank, this is an old example anyway. But the book was engaging and moved along fairly well. After working on Emma for a couple weeks, it was nice to run through a book in a couple of nights.

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I picked up this book off of the discount rack at a regular book store. I probably paid a couple dollars for it and I am sure I wanted to impress Heather by looking smart and reading it. Some years later, I picked it up.

The edition, the Everyman Library paperback, is not the best edition aesthetically, which figures since it was on the cheap shelf. It’s a paperback with lightweight paper and, most appallingly, rife with typographical errors.

Unlike when I read Kafka, I did not read the supporting introductory essay before I delved into the book. I did glance at the timeline of Jane Austen’s life, though, to clarify the time period in which she was writing. I also admit that I read the back, which reveals the entirety of the plot as well as any Cliff Notes. It’s just as well, though, since I could focus on the characterization and catch hints that I knew would indicate the conclusion.

The book centers on Emma Woodhouse, a 20-year-old daughter of gentry who has recently lost her nanny/confidante to marriage and who decides to help elevate a young lady of unknown origins. Miss Woodhouse decides to make a match (as one would expect in an Austen novel) for Miss Smith. Emma tries to set her up with the vicar, then the local gentleman farmer, and finally the son of her nanny’s husband. Emma, the novel lets us know, is not as insightful into the human condition and heart as she thinks she is. She misinterprets signs, feelings, and motivations of almost everyone around her and eventually ends up attached to the local gentleman farmer. This summary is slightly more obscure than the back cover for your non-spoiler pleasure.

When reading historic novels, I often wander into thoughts of who the target audiences for these books would have been in the early 1800s when the book was out initially. Surely, it speaks of the upper class without disdain which is so fashionable in serious fiction now. It focuses on young (late teens or early 20s) people making matches and courting. I guess it was targeted to those markets, or merely whatever literates wandered England at the time. So it meant something different to them 200 years ago than it does now, but I read it just the same.

Well, that’s all I got for now. I never really did go back to read the introduction nor the end material, but I have the luxury of reading this because I wanted to (and it was on my To Read shelves). I don’t have to put together some sort of coherent paper (obviously) and defend arguments against the patriarchy vigorously enough to pass a class. Which is nice, in a way. In all ways, actually.

Books mentioned in this review:

In February, I read Geherin’s The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, and I mentioned having read Sons of Sam Spade in college. Sometime this summer, I found an ex-library copy at a bok fair, so I picked it up for a re-read. In the intervening fifteen years since I first read this book, Robert B. Parker has put out a number of books, including non-series novels and two new non-Spenser series, that really don’t live up to the promise of his beginning four. I’ve also read several of the Roger L. Simon Moses Wine novels (The Lost Coast, California Roll, The Big Fix, and Peking Duck) and they probably live up to my preconception of them.

I haven’t read anything by the third author covered, Andrew Bergman, but his work sounds interesting enough to look for when book fair season begins next summer.

The content of Sons of Sam Spade, like The American Private Eye, offer a nice summary of some of the late entrants (at the time) into the genre and makes a good, short respite from actually reading the genre. It’s literary criticism, sort of, and I can enjoy it.

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Well. I bought this book cheaply at a book fair because I was already buying dozens of other books, so what could this one hurt? My pride, my friends, my pride.

For this book offers a hundred some pages of quizzes that cover the field of crime fiction mostly of the twentieth century, and as a trivia-lover, I fell very, very short.

I thought I was doing all right on the authors I know well. A couple of questions touched on the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain. A couple on the Lew Archer books by Ross MacDonald. I even answered correctly a number of questions about Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, some of which I read in high school. But there’s a great number of books, authors, and series in classical and frankly just 20th century fiction that I didn’t get around to reading yet, although there’s plenty of it to be read in the Noggle Library.

My final humbling came at the hands of a simple quiz that just wanted me to get the colors right in the titles of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. It’s been a year since I last touched one of these books, and some many more for most. I got a couple right–I can even see the cover for Free Fall in Crimson in my mind’s eye since I just organized some of the read shelves this year, but ultimately, I fell very short. For an author whose books I really enjoyed and have, in several instances, read more than once.

Forget it, the Northside Mind Flayers trivia night team is no more, for I cannot even respect myself for my performance with this book.

But it was a quick browse, like a phone book. Only occasionally did my eyes fall upon a familiar name. The rest of the time I was turning pages without comprehension.

Books mentioned in this review:

When you’ve got a self-help sex book with the dedication TO MY FATHER – Who taught me the meaning of tenderness with his soft cheeks and gentle hands, you know you’re getting into some downright creepy psychoanalysis territory. To help women of the baby boom generation cope with their sexual hang-ups, Dr. Irene Kassorla has devised the PLEASURE PROCESS, a set of steps not actually recognized by ANSI or ISO. This process involves the usual good advice about sex:

• Care about your partner.
• Communicate with your partner.
• Have sex with your partner.

However, it’s wrapped in psychoanalysis that obviously traces all sexual hangups to interaction with the parents as a baby. Ergo, Dr. Kassorla invites you to free-associate while going at it, particularly if you’re able to free-associate yourself to a repressed memory and its attendant guilt of a moment where your daddy was changing you and you were gloriously naked in the bassinet. If you’re able to talk about that with your partner while you’re both, um, busy, you’ll get over the guilt that’s held you back and will finally achieve orgasm.

I mean, ew. Please. No. That’s not a test of whether your partner loves you, ladies; that’s a test of whether your partner is listening to you. For his sake and for the sake of your relationship, I hope he’s not.

Frankly, Irene Kassorla is no Marabel Morgan, and I’m glad Ruth Westheimer had Dr. Kassorla “disappeared” in the great sex therapist turf battles of the end of the disco era. Because frankly, I’m more hung up than when I started the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

Now I remember where I got these books; I bought them at Patten Books for a couple dollars each after I discovered how well they sold on eBay. Unfortunately, I would also later discover that the books available in bookstores tended toward the later, less salable editions. In a final stroke of ill luck, I started reading the ones I couldn’t sell and found they were okay. So now I go into bookstores looking to buy them and might, someday, float ludicrous sums of money to buy back the very books I once bought for fifty cents and sold at great profit.

But I digress. This, the fifth book in the series, finds Tarl Cabot disguised as an assassin hunting someone who wanted to kill him in his rebuilding home city of Ko-Ro-Ba. He travels to Ar and enters the employ of a slaver to find out what he can about his adversaries. In the course of having his vengeance, he aids a plot to overthrow the leaders of that city.

Again, the main character is strong, assertive, and still a pawn of things he only half-understands. The book continues some of the serial story alluding to a bigger payoff and bigger plots to come in the series.

I remembered where I got these books because I returned to Patten Books to fill in the gaps in my set. I picked up 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10, which means I now only lack 9 of the first 10. Although Patten had a number of the later books, I held off on spending the sums to which I alluded (over $20 for at least one of the paperbacks) until I get a better sense of whether I’ll enjoy the books that late in the series. The earlier books remained in print for a long time, making them cheap and plentiful, whereas the later books are expensive because they had fewer printings. Whether this is due to quality drop-off or the backlash against the books that arose in the 1980s, I’m unsure, but I’m certainly not spending good liquor money on those books yet.

But all signs indicate that I’ll buy 11 sometime in the next year or so.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book this year at the Carondolet Y Book Fair, I think. It’s back when I thought I might write for Damn Interesting, so I purposefully sought out compendia like this that would give me inspiration for stories I could write. I never got the gig, but I do have a number of interesting books to read.

It’s only after I cracked this book open that the brevity coupled with the large print size indicated that this might be a juvenile book. That’s okay, though, as I am often juvenile.

The book contains a number of short chapters on famous spies through history, including Mata Hari, Nathaniel Hale, Gary Powers, and Rudolf Abel. Aside from these well-known figures, the book also covers Major William Martin (see, it is Damn Interesting sort of material); Velvalee Dickinson, spy for Japan in World War II; Peter Ortiz, Marine reserve and leader of the French resistance in WWII; and others. The brief chapters and simple language make it a very quick read and serves as trivia fodder or a source for further investigation.

So it was worth my time, even if I’m three times the age of its target audience. Plus, it’s the 76th book I read this year. So there.

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I know, what’s next, book reports on Dell mini mags? But I read this book and it’s 96 pages, so it’s thicker than some of the tracts I’ve covered here. It’s a tiny little octo or whatever you would call it with a number of crime-related puzzles. You’re supposed to figure them out and look up the answer in the back to see if you’re right. The book’s stories are split between logic puzzles, the kind you’re supposed to draw grids for and mark off the inferences from a finite number of statements of fact such as “One of the suspects is a liar,” and the more Encyclopedia Brownish spot-the-inconsistencies. I prefered the latter, mainly because I read this in bed often and didn’t have pen and paper to do the logic puzzles.

I paid a quarter for it at a book fair (Carondolet 2006? Oh, it’s so hard to tell). It’s worth it if you can get a cheap copy if you remember Encyclopedia Brown fondly.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the new Spenser novel, released this week. I read it. Atypically for me, I read it over the course of two nights. Normally, it only takes one, but I completed The Night Crew, so I didn’t get a good run at it.

This book is another one featuring April Kyle, also of Ceremony and Taming a Seahorse. Like the Paul Giacomin cycle, these are trilogies of sorts. This time, April Kyle is back in Boston and is running a franchise brothel for Patricia Utley. When some men come along and want to take the business away from her, she turns to Spenser.

He has to investigate to find out who the men are and why they’re after April’s business. He finds that everyone’s lying to him, including April, and has to hang in there to find out the real story.

It’s a pretty good book, I guess, but after 20 years, it’s very familiar; the Sandford book was different in that I didn’t know what to expect. With this one, I knew pretty much how it would go and realized the storyline pretty early. Still, I shall always be loyal and serve Robert B. Parker as my master.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, I have discovered that I like John Sandford’s novels; I’ve reviewed a couple of Kidd novels and a couple of the Lucas Davenport novels. Last week, I assembled a couple more book cases so I could spread out my to-read shelves (now comprising more thn three complete bookshelves), and this book emerged.

Within, a freelance news crew in LA works at night to find and film news. After one excursion in which they film an animal rights raid on a university lab and a jumper, someone starts shooting members of the crew. Someone seems obsessed with Anna, the leader of the group, and is killing the potential rivals in his sick pursuit of her.

Wow, you can sum books up pretty simply if you just tell the plot. Fortunately, this book has more to it; the main character has depth, the auxilliary characters have depth and individual agenda. I was interested in it and the book flowed nicely. It probably could even have done without the “eye of the mad criminal” inserts that Sandford threw in like eveyone does these days.

However, the climax was kinda tacked on and didn’t build any sort of excitement that made it worthwhile. A climactic shootout at a farmhouse. Ho hum. I actually put the book down in the middle of the drama and picked it up the next night. So the payoff could have been improved, but the denouement satisfied me.

So Sandford continues to prove worthy of the bucks I spend on his books. If I ever catch up with him, I might have to buy his books new, and that’s the best compliment I can give an author.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, it’s been a year and a half since I read a Robert Crais novel (The Forgotten Man). I’d even forgotten this book existed, since it was behind a wall of unread books on my to read shelves. Now that I have a couple extra book cases, I have spread these books out, and it appeared.

I wasn’t that pleased with Crais’s later offerings leading up to this book, but I was very happy with this book. It centers on a convicted bank robber getting out and integrating into society. However, on the day before he gets out, his estranged son, an LAPD officer, is gunned down. The official story doesn’t make sense, and the ex-con turns to the FBI agent who put him away, now retired, for help.

Together, they try to find out why four police officers allowed someone to come up to them in a secluded riverbed without suspicion. They determine that the officers were looking for sixteen million dollars in unrecovered bank heist loot. Once they found it, a fifth man eliminated his partners. Someone in the police force wants the ex-con to be re-con to protect himself and his retirement.

The pace moves along well, the characters are interesting, and I rather liked the book. I got it as a gift from my beautiful wife, and it’s probably worth the money if you want to click the link below.

And based on this book, maybe I’ll even read any new Elvis Cole novels.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

This is my second Alistair MacLean of the year (the first, as you remember, was The Golden Gate in August. Both stem from the 1970s, which based upon the evidence of these two texts might represent the phoning-it-in period for MacLean.

The book starts out with an race car crash in the European Grand Prix circuit. The reigning champion apparently has lost his nerve and become an alcoholic. However, he seems to have some hidden agenda, for while he’s putting on the show, he’s sneaking around and investigating something. MacLean doesn’t really draw us into his investigations or quickly identify the real meat of the story–Harrow has gone underground or underdog to find out who’s gambling on the races and fixing them by sabotauging cars while selling heroin.

The reader goes along mainly because it’s an Alistair MacLean book and something’s going to happen. It does, and then the book ends abruptly.

Not MacLean’s best effort, and not even as good as Floodgate, which draws the user into the plot if not the characters. The Way to Dusty Death does neither, really.

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As you know, gentle reader, I am something of an Anglophile as long as it doesn’t require actually traveling to Britain or liking, really, anyone or anything currently British. I was an English major, though, and as much as I tilted the degree toward American writers, I couldn’t escape the constraints of my collegiate upbringing. Plus, I think it’s interesting the progression of the English monarches throughout much of the relevant history of the Western world.

Consider this book to be a more detailed version than Britain’s Kings and Queens: 63 Reigns in 1100 Years, which I reviewed three years ago. That pamphlet, from the same time period as the edition of this book that I read, summed up the leaders and the effects their rules had upon England and Europe at large; this book, though, offers more verbosity in the leaders’ lifetimes and occasional sections into the time periods. Of course, this book is worth more than the pamphlet I reviewed in 2003, but it’s an expansion on the themes and rules therein.

Both books I’ve reviewed come from the early 1970s, so there’s not been much change in the lineage aside from the marriage of Charles III (projected) and the divorce of Charles III (projected) and his issue. Still, in the 1970s, the chroniclers had a certain (as sports fans now call it) homer sentiment; that is, the introduction of this book admits that the early rulers were barbaric, but the early times were barbaric, but that the home team (Britain) eventually turned out okay and that its influence on the world was good. As an American conservative, I respect that (and apply it to my own country).

This edition (ca 1975) offered me enough trivia and Britainnia to be worthwhile; I cannot speak to the late editions, but I don’t think they’ll be any less interesting.

On a side note, I’ll let you know, gentle reader, that I was a little ashamed of recovering the same territory that I mentioned in my review of the Bellews book. Until such time as I discovered when I covered that book, that is. I thought I’d read that book this year, or perhaps late last year. When the beauty that is this blog revealed that I read that earlier pamphlet 3 years ago, I was stunned. What a different world that was, for me at least. What were you doing then, and was it as immediate for you as the 9th century was for me?

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This book is part of the Quest for the Unknown set, and I guess its schtick is that it’s supposed to center around the past. It does have chapters on ley lines, old temples and sacred places, and whatnot, but it also lumps in lesser past things like mediums and some recent disappearances. It’s not exhaustive nor even detailed in the subjects it covers, preferring a very browsable format with small articles and lots of photographs and sidebars.

Still, if you’re jonesing for a Reader’s Digest compendium of paranormal and other things that make you go hmmmm, you’re better off with Mysteries of the Unexplained, which relies more on copy, is longer, and includes source notes.

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In stark contrast to the long, well thought out and meticulous Gor books I’ve been reading, here’s a short (140ish) paged book that’s the start of a trilogy. Set in the far future in a Utopia where man can bend matter and time to his whims, an indulgent and decadent playboy decides he’s going to court a recent arrival from 19th century England. As he tries to woo her with poorly-remembered and rendered gifts and all the luxuries the id can provide, she tries, as a Christian, to teach him virtue.

Then he goes back in time to retrieve her after one of his contemporary friends sends her back, and he meets his friend there as a judge who sentences him to death in 1896, but he’s spared and returned to the future for some purpose to be revealed in the next book. Good luck with that, protagonist. You’re on your own as far as I’m concerned.

Certainly, there’s some allegory in this remnant of 60s sensibility. I don’t think I’ll bother with it when I can pick up another Gor book instead. Perhaps I could spin some allegory of my own, where I generalize that certain segments of the population envisage a world of self-indulgence, lax moral standards, and whims catered to by forces whose details are so forgotten they might be magic, and that some segments of the population read books where evil exists and sometimes a man has to pick up a sword and chop at evil. But that’s too hasty a generalization for me, and besides that, no one cares thirty four years after these books might have met head-to-head for the soul of science fictiondom.

Man, who would have expected me to read another Moorcock two and a half years after I read The Black Corridor? Well, anyone who knows how books get off of my to-read shelves, I reckon.

And in closing, non sequitir, this is the 67th book I’ve read this year. Boo-ya!

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