Sunday Morning Book Thread 09-01-2019

National Library of Greece, Athens

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, crétins sans pantalon (who are technically breaking the rules), beer nuts, lug nuts, coconuts, grape nuts, doughnuts, and other assorted nuts. Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, snark, witty repartee, hilarious bon mots, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, writing, and publishing by escaped oafs and oafettes who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. Even if it's these pants, worn by a woman who is trying to pass herself off as a homeless person, but it won't work because her shoes are a dead giveaway.

Pic Note

Today's library looks pretty modern, but it does contain a lot of history:

The library has 4,500 Greek manuscripts which is one of the greatest collection of Greek scripts. There are also many chrysobulls and archives of the Greek Revolution.

Among the library's holdings are a codex of the four Gospels attributed to the scribe Matthew; uncial codex with a fragment Gospel of Matthew from 6th century (Uncial 094), Flora Graeca Sibthorpiana by English botanist John Sibthorp; Rigas' Chart by Rigas Velestinlis; The Large Etymological Dictionary, a historic Byzantine dictionary; and the first publication of Homer's epics and hymns.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

Ok yeah wait...lots of these too pic.twitter.com/TDgzFwBMWQ

— Dawn 💙⚾️ (@aurora_g96) July 27, 2019

The Great DragonCon $0.99 Book Sale

It's a #DragonCon sale!

Check out these great $0.99 books by @MorlockP @Mashak99 @DeclanFinnBooks @WoodFenton @JohnTaloni @jondelarroz @robkroese @NerdKing52 @rnewquist @kevasidhe @MichaelARothman @GScottHuggins @carlmelcher @lampwright4 https://t.co/tz7cX4nd7r pic.twitter.com/eC7hUunCJR

— Hans G. Schantz (@AetherCzar) August 30, 2019

Going on now:

An estimated 80,000 fans will gather in Atlanta this Labor Day weekend for DragonCon in Atlanta, GA for a celebration of science fiction, fantasy and comics. Attending authors, the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance, and other friends are offering great deals on their work in honor of the event – all these books are $0.99 each (set by the author or publisher, so please confirm before buying).

There are blurbs for the sale books at the above link.

Meanwhile, the cancel culture virus is raging unchecked through SFF:

It’s funny to watch as Analog Magazine cancelled one of its forefather champions yesterday, John W. Campbell, removing the former editor’s name from the award for best new writer from the Hugos because a current winner, Jeanette Ng, made some crazy rant about white men and fascism.

The official statement from Analog where they announce their capitulation to the latest craze of cancel culture is both hilarious and pathetic, including this howler:

Though Campbell’s impact on the field is undeniable, we hope that the conversation going forward is nuanced. George Santayana’s proverbial phrase remains as true today as when it was coined: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I hope you all caught that. So, in other words, in order to be true to history, they're going to be erasing history. That's what the Analog statement actually says. You have to climb up to an extra special level of cluelessness or mendaciousness in order to be able to write something like that.

The write-up at this link is pretty good.

Who Dis:

Celeb quote: "I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one."

Books By Morons

199 A few years ago I wrote a book on progressive media lies (based on the experience of a defamed family member). My research included writings from the Columbia J-School in the 70s. The seeds for what we're seeing today were planted long ago. What used to be called "liberal bias", a benign term describing how personal political inclinations shaped and seeped into news coverage, has metastasized into a consuming mission of cultural conquest. Given the nature of Leftism, this should have been easy to predict.

Posted by: Dan Smoot's Apprentice at August 27, 2019 11:39 AM (H8QX8)

So many of you morons have come out as published authors, I'm starting to think I'm the only one on this blog who hasn't written a book.

So here's DSA's book he published back in 2015: The Executive and the Smear: How and why my father was trashed in a book on Roger Ailes, or the poisonous farce of progressive "journalism". It tells a story I had not heard before, and indeed, I had no inking of:

In 1973 – before FOX and CNN – former president of ABC Radio Bob Pauley secured financing for his long-held vision of a fourth TV network. This was Television News Inc. (TVN). Because it was primarily funded by conservative beer titan Joe Coors, and later employed a young Roger Ailes as consultant and executive, TVN was attacked by the liberal media establishment. By 1975 Coors had pulled his funding and TVN was gone. In his 2014 best-selling unauthorized biography of Fox News chief Ailes, progressive journalist Gabriel Sherman twisted the legacy of TVN into a failed right-wing media crusade which led to the emergence of Fox, smearing Pauley in the process. In “The Executive and the Smear,” Pauley’s son corrects the record about both TVN and his iconoclastic father and his belief in the civic responsibility of the broadcaster and his dream of a truly impartial and more diversely-sourced news service for the American public ("fair and balanced" was Bob Pauley's original coinage). The author, a screenwriter in Hollywood, also makes a larger statement about the degeneration of modern journalism into an ideological guild of defamation and the Progressive elite’s corruption of the liberal ideals of fairness, truth and compassion.

This short book (92 pages) is available on Kindle for $2.99.

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What kind of book do you think this most resembles?

It's said humans use only 10% of our minds. But what if there are some who can use more? In modern day Chicago three gangs of psychic youth vie for power. Led by their Kings, each one seeking to control the city. Unfortunately for them, Daniel Cavanough has no interest in such matters. His only concern is to find the truth of his father and sister's murder. With The Black Dog sniffing around, and the mysterious Rose throwing her own hat in the ring, it may not be the wind blowing things about.

Is it possible to change Crimson Minds?

Perhaps you would say it sounds like an urban fantasy novel, maybe with the title Crimson Minds. You'd almost be right. It is actually a book of poetry with the title Crimson Minds: A verse thriller. Unfortunately, their is no preview available on Amazon. But the author is the son of a lurking moron and I have featured his books of poetry in a previous book thread. And some of his other books do have previews. So check out:

Colors of the Heart: A Collection of Christian Poetry

Catch the Moment: A Collection of Narrative Poetry

...and you can get an idea how capable he is.

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They Don't Publish Books Like This Any More:

Moron Recommendations

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the podcasts of historian John Batchelor. Which prompted:

Once upon a time, he was known as -
John Calvin Batchelor....a novelist!
He wrote two pretty good novels -
"The Birth of The Peoples Republic of Antarctica" -
which I believe most morons would like.

Posted by: naturalfake at August 18, 2019 10:35 AM (mIQCW)

OK, let's take a look at it. The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica is OOP and electronic editions don't exist. Here is the all-too-brief Amazon blurb:

A group of American expatriates and their children, living in Sweden, find themselves battling for survival with desperate guerrilla bands on forbidding archipelagos in Antarctica and South America.

The other Batchelor novel naturalfake thought was good is American Falls, about the clash of two agents of the rival Secret Services.

Batchelor wrote a number of other books, among them Ain't You Glad You Joined the Republicans?: A Short History of the GOP and the novel-within-a-novel Gordon Liddy Is My Muse.

These books are also OOP and only used copies are available.

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'Ette commenter/lurker March Hare e-mails in a rec for her summer reading project:

My "big book" for the summer was "Some Came Running" by James Jones. And it IS big: 1266 pages, unabridged edition. This is not a quick read, but an amble through the lives of several of the citizens of Parkman, IL. Dave Hirsch is the locus of most of the action: a veteran of WWII, he is returning to the hometown he left some 19 years ago. He is in his late 30's, so he has done some living, including writing a novel and several short stories, then becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Mr. Jones brings to life the post-war ennui of small town Midwest. Boosterism is important as are social clubs: the Country Club, the Elks, the Rotary, the American Legion. The women who work in the factories want to have a good time, get married, have kids, and be respectable. The men, many who are veterans, spend their time in the local bar, drinking and dancing. The upper tier and the socially mobile aren't much different--they just do their drinking elsewhere. It's not a cheerful look at this society; kind of like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The movie version features Frank Sinatra as Dave, Dean Martin as 'Bama, and Shirley MacLaine as Ginnie. The ending was changed (a suggestion of Sinatra's). An abridged edition of about 600 pages was issued and a lot of the nuance was stripped. Mr. Jones's daughter authorized a "re-edited" version that is just over 1000 pages--I don't know what changes were made.

This is Mr. Jones's sophomore effort, after "From Here to Eternity," and was not a critical success. But it's an interesting look at the social milieu of a small town in the late-1940's.

The Kindle version of Some Came Running is "authorized abridged version" on the cover, but

Five decades later, it has been revised and reedited under the direction of the Jones estate to allow for a leaner, tighter read. The result is the masterpiece Jones intended: a tale whose brutal honesty is as shocking now as on the day it was first published.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.

So it's the re-edited version. $9.99.

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Any of you morons familiar with the British author Victor Canning? I had not, but Amazon decided to show me his books at the bottom of the page when I was looking at something else.

So apparently he wrote a series of books featuring Mr. Edgar Finchley, the first one being Mr Finchley Discovers His England:

Mr. Edgar Finchley, unmarried clerk, aged 45, is told to take a holiday for the first time in his life. He decides to go to the seaside. But Fate has other plans in store…

From his abduction by a cheerful crook, to his smuggling escapade off the south coast, the timid but plucky Mr Finchley is plunged into a series of the most astonishing and extraordinary adventures.

What struck me, though, is how appealling the reviews are:

‘An overlooked gem. An innocent picaresque novel set in an arcadian version of mid 20th century England. The literary equivalent of naive painting, it narrates the adventures of a respectable upper middle-aged man who takes retirement.’

‘An antidote to the rush of the early 21st century.’

‘A thoroughly enjoyable stroll through a vanished England with some lovable characters. Don't expect modern, fashionable agonisings, here there is good, evil, and understanding. A lovely reminiscent wallow of a read.’

‘A delight to be transported to an England I never knew despite growing up in the 1950s and to experience the countryside through the sharp eyes of the author who obviously had a great love of all things rural.’

And the Kindle edition is only $3.99! And there are two sequels, Mr. Canning Goes To Paris and
Mr. Finchley Takes The Road.

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Currently finishing reading Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Grabar. Just released, it is an excellent expose' of Zinn's fraudulent "People's History of the United States." Zinn was a Marxist that hated America and Grabar dives into his (primarily Leftist) sources and shows where Zinn omits passages, selectively edits quotations and creates falsehoods to advance his theme that the United States is the manifestation of the evils of Capitalism and evil white men. Everybody should own a copy in order to knowledgeably to be able to refute anybody that parrots Zinn's talking points.; you can say more than 'I disagree' but say 'Zinn was a liar and here's proof.' Rating = 5.0/5.

Posted by: Retired Buckeye Cop is now an engineer at August 25, 2019 09:24 AM (5Yee7)

The Amazon blurb for Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America is extensive. It end with:

Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended. If you care about America’s past—and our future—you need this book.

Zinn was a rat bastard commie and his agitprop People's History of the United States is one of the most poisonous books ever published, and I don't think America will be able to truly heal until it is consigned to the dustbin of history.

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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

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posted by OregonMuse at 09:00 AM

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