Sunday Morning Book Thread - 06-12-2022 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

(ht: Diogenes via CBD)

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever
guilty pleasure we feel like reading (now with more bacon!). Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material, even if it's nothing more than the tweets of a failed reporter like Felicia Somnez. As always, pants are required, especially if you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, pluck the turkey, chicken, Cornish hen, duck, and quail for your Turbacon Epic and crack open a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

Today's picture comes via a roundabout method. Diogenes sent the pic to CBD, who then forwarded it to me. Any 29+ year-olds around here remember the wooden card catalogs that used to be one of the most distinguishing features of your local branch or school library? Those were basically analog search engines. Sometimes you might have to go back and forth between drawers looking for the right source. Each card contained a wealth of data and metadata, allowing researchers to efficiently find books and other resources. There's a lot of skill required for properly indexing content. HERE is an explanation of the information presented on a library catalog card. Last week we had some discussion in the comments about Roger Zelazny's classic fantasy tale, The Chronicles of Amber.
HERE is the library catalog card for the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber.

IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER

A few weeks ago, Moron fd send me the following email:

I was reading about Norse Mythology and learned a new old word. "Fimbulfambi". It means "Mighty Fool" in Icelandic. Kind of fits a certain President don't you think?

https://www.wordsense.eu/fimbulfambi/

If you look up this word you might find some mention of it in relation to The Hobbit.

- fd

Comment: What I love about this word is that when you sound it out, it does seem to be a perfect description of a certain "President" of the United States. It's also something he might "stutter" while trying to pronounce an unfamiliar or complicated word on his TelePrompter, though it might come out as "fumblefanny."

Moron author Dr_No (see the Books by Morons below) likes the word "tricknology." There does not appear to be a standardized definition of this word as of yet, but it does show up in Urban Dictionary and other sources. Lexico defines the word as follows:

Tricknology (n.)

1. US Derogatory The techniques of deception and manipulation employed by a dominant group (especially a white majority) to disempower a weaker one (especially a black minority).


2. Innovative techniques or technology, especially for recording or performing music

Comment: If Dr_No is lurking about this morning, perhaps he can shed some light on his own interpretation of the term "tricknology." This word is interesting because it's still somewhat evolving into a normal part of language. Only time will tell if it makes a permanent impact.

(ht: OrangeEnt)

Along with today's pic, CBD forwarded me an email from Moron author "Dr_No" with a new book he's written. Honestly, after taking a look at it, words fail me. It's...unusual, to say the least. It's very weird and creative.

Waiting For The Parade: A Tricknological Collexion of Stories from the Unconscious Mind

I invite you to take a quick look at it using A'zon's 'Look Inside' feature. It's not your 'average' book, but it is - imho - a somewhat entertaining read. This volume is also Black & White on the inside pages, which is a big change from the All-Color Format of the first volume. As a result, I can offer this one for a much lower purchase price, which is always good in this economy. From cover to cover, the project is 100% mine - artwork, typesetting, formatting, etc etc, so any mistakes also fall squarely on my shoulders ... and so should any credit. I hope you enjoy the preview.

Richard

(Dr_No)

Comment: I don't want to step on CBD's toes, because he does such a fantastic job with the Art Threads, but we should do a Book Thread with books as art one of these days. There are a lot of gorgeous books out there that are works of art in their own right, regardless of the content. One of the great things about books is that you are only limited by your own imagination when creating a book. You should definitely take a sneak peak using the Look Inside feature at the Amazon link above.

We also have the following contribution, which is a memoir of a woman who survived both Stalin and Hitler.

Sgt. Mom, who writes for Chicago Boyz, formatted a book for publication by IngramSpark for me entitled Inna, Between Two Worlds. She suggested I message you as the literati at AoSHQ might find it a worthwhile read. The book was written by my Mother-in-Law, Inna Grinfeldt Zimmermann, who had the dubious honor of living under both Hitler and Stalin. She was born in 1922 and grew up near Poltava. When she was 10, her father was arrested and later died in the Gulag. The Germans later overran the town she was living in. She met and later married a German soldier while working at their version of the USO. Her husband, Wolfram Zimmermann, had been navigator aboard a Ju-88, but was injured in a crash landing. After recovering, he served as a singer in an entertainment unit until it was overrun by the Red Army in Rumania. Inna was in Germany at the time and bore her first child there during an American air raid. Wolfram found some peasant clothing and managed to survive for two years behind the iron curtain before finally making his way to the Austrian/German border where he met Inna, and they walked across on a mountain path.

Inna originally wrote her story in Russian, and a lady in Slovakia recently finished translating it for us. I see that it is currently available at Amazon, Walmart, etc.

Regards,

Douglas Drake

Comment: If you ever have the opportunity to talk to someone about their life behind the Iron Curtain, plant yourself. You will hear incredible stories about what it was really like to live in that environment. A lot of brave people risked everything, abandoned everything, to come to the West. Their stories deserve to be told.

Douglas and I have been corresponding a bit and he has some more information from Inna that he plans on including in a revised, updated edition of this book. He also has a rough Google Translation of an interrogation session with Inna's father, Vladimir.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

Morning to all you book types!

I'm rereading (for the 3rd time) Stephen King's 11/22/63. I know he's not well thought of here, but politics aside, he is a superb storyteller at his best. This novel is one of his tops: time travel with an interesting catch. Every time you go into the past, it's a reset -- anything you did on the previous trip, you have to do again, or it won't happen. And each time you step through on the same day in 1958 -- you can't jump forward in time.

It's a grand adventure, a love story, a suspense tale with a built-in ticking clock, and a wonderful evocation of the late Fifties and early Sixties in America. Highly recommended.

Posted by: Wolfus Aurelius at June 05, 2022 09:14 AM (c6xtn)

Comment: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually--from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint--it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff" - The Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who, "Blink"

he Timey-Wimey Ball is what happens when time-travel stories get complicated and weird. This story sounds like a prime example of the timey-wimey ball in action. It can be a lot of fun trying to unravel it so that it makes coherent narrative sense. Stephen King is one of the few authors who can probably pull off an exceptionally complicated time-travel story and do it well. He also wrote The Dark Tower series, which involves a number of complex multiversal concepts. Just to give you an example, here's a flowchart of the Stephen King universe (11/22/63 is at the bottom right in the chart).

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland is another excellent, convoluted time-travel story that goes nuts with the timey-wimey ball. It's also an example of creative story-telling as the entire story is presented as emails, memos, chat logs, and other miscellaneous business documents showing the interactions between employees of the Department of Diachronic Operations (D.O.D.O), a shadowy government organization studying time-travel.

I read a graphic novel, The Electric State and I recommend it.

It's a weird story about an alternate 1990s world. There was an invention, the neurocaster, that took everyone by storm. The book makes it unclear what the neurocaster actually did--did it project fantasy images into their heads or did it just project pleasure impulses? The book strongly suggests the latter. With the hinted idea that the connected minds are combining into some kind of super-intelligence...which seems to lack any intelligence other than furthering itself.

And then there was a world war, fought entirely by remote machines, which lasted for seven years, and then--stopped somehow.

The text story is of a young woman trying to cross the country to reconnect with her lost brother. And the text bits are the weakest part of the book, because what really resonates are the incredible images.

Seriously, the graphics in this book are outstanding. More than worth the price of the thing.

And yeah, the text stuff gets into our female protagonist's early Lesbian leanings and such. Not enough to grate, but enough where you're "I'm glad I bought this for the images and not the text."

Posted by: BeckoningChasm at June 05, 2022 09:52 AM (m0zqP)

Comment: Graphic novels are a somewhat underappreciated genre, in my opinion. There are some really excellent stories out there that are only found in graphic novel format. James O'Barr's The Crow and the Star Wars: Dark Empire series are two of my own personal favorites (though to be honest the artwork in Dark Empire is a bit hit or miss).

This week I finished the second installment in Secret Squirrel's Outward Frontier series, ALAMO. Great story, I'm looking forward to the third one.

Posted by: DIY Daddio at June 05, 2022 09:54 AM (RJscS)

Comment: I enjoyed Outward Frontier quite a bit. It's a pretty decent story about aliens clashing with humans when the Mo Tian start rampaging across the human colony worlds. Unlike a lot of science fiction interstellar empires, there is no unified Earth, which makes for interesting political dynamics as each Earth nation-state tries to protect their extrasolar territory.

Last, but not least, we have the following recommendation from TheJamesMadison. He posted this on a random thread this past week, but I was watching and snagged his comment for this week's Sunday Morning Book Thread. I guess he likes to sleep in late after working hard to post the Saturday Evening Movie Thread...

So, this would be more appropriate to the book thread, but I never make it.

So, I just finished reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and I was struck by the love story that just ends up falling flat.

It's a long mystery story about a woman who marries out of obligation a supposed nobleman who is all sorts of shady. She has a true love, her drawing teacher, and they do the proper British thing and separate until the mystery ends up drawing them back together.

Anyway, this girl, Laura, ends up being barely a character. She's passive, meek, and largely uninteresting. However, her sister, Marian, is fierce, intelligent, and strong. The drawing master, towards the end of the book, has to interact with her a lot to finish out the mystery, and I swore that he was going to realize that Marian was actually the woman to marry, not passive, little Laura, but nope. He just marries the little woman of no particular interest because true love, or something.

Whatever.

Posted by: TheJamesMadison, fighting the system with Kobayashi at June 06, 2022 02:37 PM (LvTSG)

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (208 Moron-recommended books so far!)

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

• The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan -- Book 8 in The Wheel of Time. Also part of the infamous "slog" of the series. It's interesting to see some of the events now that I know how they will ultimately play out. Jordan is an absolute grand master of foreshadowing.
• Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan D. Blum -- This is for my day job. We're hosting a summer book reading program with several of our faculty. We will be discussing this book, which looks at alternative forms of assessing students instead of assigning them a grade.

LIBRARY BOOK HAUL UPDATE:
As regular readers over the past couple of months know, I've acquired a fair number of books from the campus library in which I work (but don't work for). Well, I went to the public library book sale on Friday and I did not leave empty handed:

Public Library Book Sale Haul

That's about all I have for this week. Thank you for all of your kind words regarding my Sunday Morning Book Thread. This is a very special place. You are very special people (in all the best ways!). The kindness, generosity, and wisdom of the Moron Horde knows no bounds. Let's keep reading!

If you have any suggestions for improvement, reading recommendations, or writing projects that you'd like to see on the Sunday Morning Book Thread, you can send them to perfessor dot squirrel at-sign gmail dot com. Your feedback is always appreciated! You can also take a virtual tour of OUR library at libib.com/u/perfessorsquirrel. Since I added sections for AoSHQ, I now consider it OUR library, rather than my own personal fiefdom...

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 06-05-22 (hat tip: vmom stabby stabby stabamillion) (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

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