Sunday Morning Book Thread 12-29-2019

Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, crétins sans pantalon (who are technically breaking the rules), NYE party-goers, party animals, party poopers, and party favors. 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, spending way too much money on books, writing books, and publishing books 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, which assumed that everyone in the 1970s was colorblind.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

The loose ‘strings’ that run down the outside of a peeled banana are properly called PHLOEM BUNDLES. pic.twitter.com/1eOvTVcKwH

— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) December 21, 2019

(click to enlarge)

"Women Writers Are Victims of Discrimination":

The 10 best selling books of the decade. https://t.co/FVipy3oOpZ pic.twitter.com/m4mKsiUXEj

— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) December 20, 2019

Books By Morons

Sarah Hoyt has a new book out, and this is how she described it to me:

This is a very weird book. I'm not entirely sure where it came from....
Well... I assume it came from the depths of my mind. I just don't want to think about it too closely.

She says it's a humorous short novel, about half as long as the ones she usually writes. Here is the plot:

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go.

But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music.

When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell.

This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

The novel is called Deep Pink and it can be purchased on Kindle for $2.99.

___________

Moron author Mark Haugen has just published a new book, a mystery novel called Mustang Lang:

A lot of people are trying to find high-end hooker Sara Kay. Last seen in Deadwood, SD, her madame, Ruby, hires local private detective Mustang Lang to find her. Meanwhile, Sara Kay's best customer Clete Stenholm, a Texas cattle tycoon, would like to find her too. He hires Mustang Lang as well. Mustang has no problem double-dipping the customers, reassuring them that beautiful women are easy to find in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It's the ugly ones who blend in...With the help of his long-time girlfriend, who is a local defense attorney, Mustang eventually locates Sara Kay and soon finds himself trying to hide her from those who hired him to find her.

Mark is also the author of Joshua's Ladder and Runaway Trane, a novel about what happens when you just get fed up with it all and need a change:

Bobby Trane surprises his Montana church one Sunday by not showing up. That's usually not a big deal, except when you're the priest. Tired of blank faces, complainers and cell phones ringing during his sermons, Bobby follows the lead of a mysterious letter he receives and takes off to save the world. He is guided to the tiny South Dakota town of Buffalo Gap where sinning is aplenty. With a den of drug-dealing Satanists on one side of town, an outlaw motorcycle gang on the other side, and a pretty, young bar owner trying to make ends meet in the middle, Bobby falls hot on the trail of a local ranch girl who's been missing for almost a year.

Unfortunately an e-version is not available, paperback only.

___________

A lurking moron author, 'Hieronymus Poe' has just published his first novel. But that doesn't mean he wrote it recently. He tells me:

I wrote it 25 years ago, and after the first few rejections trickled in, stowed it away in a drawer. Every now and then I would take the manuscript out and find myself laughing at the ridiculous exploits of my heroes, and wonder why it was never published.

...I gradually woke up to the fact that unknown authors no longer have to submit in silence to the literary gate-keepers.

So I took the time to publish it on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.

It's another comedic reworking of Don Quixote (a sub-genre in itself), placing a Quixotic madman in the modern south. It's a deeply satirical book, terribly "triggering," that pokes fun at contemporary PC culture (25 years before it became woke, and not all that funny anymore).

The Amazon blurb fleshes it out a bit:

The Dixie Don Quixote!

This is the epic tragicomedy of Jubal Quicksot, a poor but proud Southern aristocrat living in the crumbling ruins of his family plantation in the Low Country near Charleston, South Carolina.

An eccentric so obsessed with the romance of the Old South and the glories of the Lost Cause, Quicksot one day goes completely mad and sets out for Atlanta under the lunatic notion that he is a colonel in the Confederate Cavalry on a secret mission to crush Sherman and thus change the course of history.

A hilarious Quixotic misadventure; a Swiftian satire of modern America; a full-throated battle-cry against PC culture—Colonel Quicksot is sure to be enjoyed by all unreconstructed Southerners, both below and above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Colonel Quicksot is available on Kindle or paperback.

___________

Who Dis:

Moron Recommendations

Up for some short stories?

87 Just finished STRANGE WORLDS; a bold sci-fi/fantasy anthology by PAUL CLAYTON. A dozen or so politically INCORRECT short stories that are so good it's hard to believe they were conceived by one person.

I will usually read a whole novel in search of one or two good ideas, but in Clayton's STRANGE WORLDS collection each story contains at least one clever nugget that's also wrapped with a sly sense of humor.

Highly recommended.

Posted by: Craig Bodeker at December 22, 2019 09:47 AM (6LTK9)

Strange Worlds is available on Kindle for $2.99. Also paperback.

Here is a description of some of the stories from the Amazon blurb:

In the future, the love of a young man’s life is dying. He would do almost anything to keep her alive…except that! In Dog Man, it turns out that Oscar the tomcat was just misunderstood — with deadly consequences… A love sick young man attempts to tap the power of an ancient religion to secure the affections of a girl on their class trip to Christland… The dead come briefly back to life every year when the astral dimensions align in Day, or Two, of The Dead. A cynical young ‘player’, adrift in the modern, amoral age meets God on a mountain top and his life is changed forever — but not in the way he’d ever imagined.

So I think this is going to be worth the $2.99.

I've mentioned another one of Paul's story collections awhile back, Talk To A Real Live Girl and Other Stories. I notice he has also written a novel about the Walter Raleigh's lost Roanoke Colony, White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the main character of which is one

...17-year-old "wench" Maggie Hagger, whose passage on Raleigh's ship was paid by colony Governor Sir John White so she can serve his pregnant daughter. The ship's stormy passage to the New World -- during which widower White falls for Maggie, who is meanwhile evading unwanted advances from a scalawag -- establishes the many well-wrought characters, some noble (particularly real-life Native Manteo), others evil. The depiction of the colony's physical and moral disintegration between 1587 and 1590 -- as drunken, cannibalistic soldiers mutiny and brutalize the settlers they were meant to protect, and as colonists confront disease, starvation and madness -- evokes a harrowing sense of human fallibility. Readers with more than a nodding familiarity with American colonial history will experience a … déjà vu, but others less hip to what happened in late-16th century times will find this saga, which starts slowly but soon reaches page-turner velocity, to be both a dandy diversion and an entertaining education.

$3.99 on Kindle.

___________

102 I finished "Isaac: Trek to King's Mountain" by J. Wayne Fears. In 1780, teenager Isaac has the skills of anyone living west of the mountains in South Carolina. His father, and a hero to Isaac, is killed by British trrops commiting atrocities during the American Revolution. Isaac joins a militia heading over the mountains to get revenge on the British for their depredations and threats. On the way he is tutored by an older longhunter in what is needed to survive in such an endeavor.

Fears did a good job making the story historically accurate from the attitudes and circumstances of the pioneers to the physical difficulties of the march to the horror and confusion of battle in that time. There is a feel of Louis L'Amour and a Heinlein juvenile which is appealing. Some of the scenes are pretty graphic so I don't consider it a kid's book but it would be an excellent introduction to the place and people of that time.

I can say that when the story ended, Fears left the reader wanting more.

Posted by: JTB at December 22, 2019 09:52 AM (7EjX1)

There's not much to add to this excellent review, other than to emphasize the history the novel is built on:

The trek to, and the Battle of King’s Mountain, is accurately described and based on a true event. Many of the fighters in this historic 300 mile trek, and the resulting one hour and five minute battle, were teenage boys, like Isaac.This often overlooked battle, according to historians, played a major role in turning America’s War for Independence around and was a pivotal point in the birth of what became the United States of America.This is a story of everyday pioneers overcoming great odds to enjoy liberty. Equally it is story about a boy’s rapid adventure into manhood, because of his willingness to risk everything to avenge his father’s death and to assure the freedom the Overmountain settlers wanted so bad.

Isaac - Trek to King's Mountain is $4.99 on Kindle or $9.99 for the paperback edition.

___________

67 Greatly enjoying Nelson De Mille's "The Deserter."

It's the Heart of Darkness but set in the bush of Venezuela.

Posted by: Les Kinetic at December 22, 2019 09:36 AM (+fPHo)

There's high praise for this one on the Amazon page.

An “outstanding” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) blistering thriller featuring a brilliant and unorthodox Army investigator, his enigmatic female partner, and their hunt for the Army’s most notorious—and dangerous—deserter from #1 New York Times bestselling author Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille.

When Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force disappeared from his post in Afghanistan, a video released by his Taliban captors made international headlines. But circumstances were murky: Did Mercer desert before he was captured? Then a second video sent to Mercer’s Army commanders leaves no doubt: the trained assassin and keeper of classified Army intelligence has willfully disappeared.

When Mercer is spotted a year later in Caracas, Venezuela, by an old Army buddy, top military brass task Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor of the Criminal Investigation Division to fly to Venezuela and bring Mercer back to America—preferably alive. Brodie knows this is a difficult mission, made more difficult by his new partner’s inexperience, by their undeniable chemistry, and by Brodie’s suspicion that Maggie Taylor is reporting to the CIA.

The Deserter: A Novel by Nelson and Alex DeMille is available on Kindle. Also hardcover and paperback. All of which, surprisingly, are in the $14-$15 price range.

___________

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.

posted by OregonMuse at 09:00 AM

| Access Comments