Sunday Morning Book Thread 12-26-2021

Merry Christmas!

Yuletide greetings to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, and crétins sans pantalon (who are technically breaking the rules). 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 these pants, which serve chiefly as a reminder that so much of the left is just bad performance art, would be acceptable.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

Free For A Limited Time:

The e-book is free for 3 days only!https://t.co/8JNILbd5L1

— Fenton Wood (@WoodFenton) December 24, 2021

I've mentioned Fenton Wood's Yankee Republic: A Mythic Radio Adventure YA series before, but this is the first time that all 5 books in the series have been brought together in one volume. It's a story that takes some unexpected directions:

A young radio engineer travels across an alt-history America, encountering primeval gods, mythical beasts, and tall tales come to life, in a quest to build a radio transmitter that can reach the stars.

A unique take on American magical realism, combining hard SF and ancient mythology. It starts out as a boys' adventure tale, and blows up into a bigger and weirder world than you ever imagined.

YANKEE REPUBLIC is an old-school adventure series with traditional values and down-to-earth heroes. Escape from the pessimism and propaganda of modern fiction, and take a journey through a mythic America that might have been.

Omnibus edition containing the complete text of all 5 books.

A dead tree edition is also available. See the author's website for details.

Who Dis:

Christmas Reading

Discovered this book, A Tudor Christmas, by Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke, which premise is that much of our Christmas traditions have their origins not in the Victorian era, but actually much earlier:

Christmas in Tudor times was a period of feasting, revelry and merrymaking ‘to drive the cold winter away’. A carnival atmosphere presided at court, with a twelve-day-long festival of entertainments, pageants, theatre productions and ‘disguisings’, when even the king and queen dressed up in costume to fool their courtiers...

We might assume that our modern Christmas owes much to the Victorians. In fact, as Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke reveal in this fascinating book, many of our favourite Christmas traditions date back much further. Carol-singing, present-giving, mulled wine and mince pies were all just as popular in Tudor times, and even Father Christmas and roast turkey dinners have their origins in this period. The festival was so beloved by English people that Christmas traditions survived remarkably unchanged in this age of tumultuous religious upheaval.

The book is kind of spendy, but it's illustrated with original line drawings throughout, which sounds like it might be a nice coffee table book, one you can pick up, read a few pages at random, and then come back to it later.

Store-Wide Book Sale At Terror House Press:

Terror House's Christmas sale begins NOW! All Terror House e-books are on sale for $0.99! Paperbacks and audiobooks are 25% off! Merch is 20% off! Sale ends January 2!https://t.co/WKQu23JPQL

— Hans G. Schantz 🇺🇸 (@AetherCzar) December 24, 2021

Moron Recommendations

193...There's an entire genre of romance where the woman has to choose between the Rich Mr. Big and the handsome, penniless guy.

That this is even a choice speaks volumes.

And yeah, I included this well-used trope in my amusingly-written but tragically non-selling romance novel, Scorpion's Pass, which has been accurately described as Jane Austen's Dune.

Don't let the genre fool ya - I included a kick-ass battle sequence with giant sailing ships on wheels fighting off hordes of savages.

Posted by: Ace-Endorsed Author A.H. Lloyd at December 19, 2021 10:17 AM (llXky)

The Amazon blurb for Scorpion's Pass: A Tale of Love and War says this novel "sets the society and culture of Regency England against a backdrop of desert-roaming warships and mysterious not-quite-human savages. A blend of the historical and fantastic, Scorpion's Pass is a tale of love and honor in a time of war."

Romance, fighting, alt-Regency backdrop, sounds like a novel with something for everybody. And best of all, the Kindle edition is only $2.99.

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I saw this one on Twitter the other day, and if you're a student of baseball history, you might want to check out Ted Sullivan, Barnacle of Baseball: The Life of the Prolific League Founder, Scout, Manager and Unrivaled Huckster. I had never heard of Ted Sullivan before, but I'm curious about a man who has somehow picked up the title "Barnacle of Baseball":

In his day, perhaps no one in baseball was better known than Irish-born Timothy Paul "Ted" Sullivan. For 50 years, America's sportswriters sang his praises, genuflected to his genius and bought his blarney by the barrel. Damon Runyon dubbed him "The Celebrated Carpetbagger of Baseball." Cunning, fast-talking, witty and sober, Sullivan was the game's first player agent, a groundbreaking scout who pulled future Hall of Famers from the bushes, an author, a playwright and a baseball evangelist who promoted the game across five continents. He coined the term "fan" and was among the first to suggest the designated hitter--because pitchers were "a lot of whippoorwill swingers." ... Unearthing thousands of contemporaneous newspaper accounts, this first exhaustive biography of "Hustlin'" Ted Sullivan recounts the life and career of one of the greatest hucksters in the history of the game.

The downside of this book is that it's quite expensive: $40(!) for the paperback and $18(!!) for the Kindle edition. Perhaps a visit to your local library would suffice.

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Hopefully, life will be back to normal next week so I won't have to skimp on the content. 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 08:58 AM

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