Sunday Morning Book Thread - 05-26-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

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. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...(another shining example from the Met Gala)

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, fire up the grill, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

Time for summer! I believe Memorial Day Weekend is the traditional kickoff for summer activities, while Labor Day closes out the season. Why not celebrate by taking your favorite book and going to the beach? Of course, in my case, the beach is over 1000 miles away from my little town. The best I can do is take my book out to a local park, which I might just do...

AUTHORS WHO ARE ALSO ARTISTS

"Always bet the under," as Muldoon likes to say...

As always, my reading (no matter the topics) led to rabbit holes to follow. The books about drawing led to getting down my volumes on the Book of Kells and JRR Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The Book of Kells is always worth study both for its history and the incredible art.

Tolkien was a wonderful artist: creative, imaginative (no surprise there), and varied in style and materials. The book provides information about his drawings and maps. Aside from the Hobbit and LOTR connections, it includes drawings he did as a boy, mostly pen and ink, that are excellent. Add to that the drawings he did for his young children that almost a century later are still charming and amusing. Very much worth the time.

Posted by: JTB at May 19, 2024 09:41 AM (wX5h4)

JTB has recommended a number of art-related books since I took over the Sunday Morning Book Thread (and probably before that, too). J.R.R. Tolkien's art is highly distinctive, being minimalist, but also varied and interesting. My copy of The Hobbit uses one of his paintings for the cover. In fact, many editions of The Hobbit feature Tolkien's art on the cover.

JTB's comment reminded me that Tolkien is NOT the only author who has dabbled in art in addition to writing novels. Lots of authors explore other artistic endeavors because they are naturally creative people. Here are a few examples just from my own library:

P.C. Hodgell, author of The Chronicles of the Kencyrath, includes a number of drawings she's done in Blood and Ivory: A Tapestry, a collection of some of her shorter stories. She is very much into creating stained glass artwork, so her drawings tend to reflect a style reminiscent of stained glass windows, which is pretty neat, as seen here.

Master of horror Clive Barker wrote a series of YA novels, Abarat, where he includes hundreds of his own paintings throughout the story to add color and flavor to the story.

Sometimes, artists decide to turn their creative efforts to writing novels, as the artist Gerald Brom did. In addition to being an amazing artist, he's written several books, including The Child Thief, which is a retelling of J. M. Barrie's classic tale, Peter Pan.

And lets not forget all of the children's literature that is both written and illustrated by the same individual. Shel Silverstein, for example, provided all of the drawings within his children's poetry books. Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel also wrote and illustrated more than 60 books in his career.

What other authors out there have blended their creative talents into their novels and short stories?

COMMENTS FROM THE HORDE

There were a couple of comments from last week that I'd like to address. I didn't get to address them last week because I was at church when they came in and I don't get home from church until around the time the Sunday Morning Book Thread is over (11 a.m. my time).

I believe there was one suggesting that the Doomsday Machine Kirk and Spock defeated was only one of several, and they had been created by a long-dead race as defense against something even worse . . . the Borg!

Posted by: Wolfus Aurelius, Dreaming of Elsewhere at May 19, 2024 10:15 AM (wX5h4)

There was some discussion of Star Trek novels and this came up. Wolfus is correct in that there is a novel that's a sequel to a Star Trek episode: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Vendetta by Peter David. The premise is that Captain Jean-Luc Picard is suffering from PTSD after being an instrument of the Borg ("Locutus"). In his dreams he's visited by a mysterious woman calling out to him. Meanwhile, a strange starship is discovered after it's annihilated a Borg cube while the Borg are assimilating another world. The Enterprise-D is sent to investigate the situation and discovers that this mysterious spaceship is directly connected to the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: The Original Series. The woman in Picard's dreams is onboard, linked to the spirits of an ancient race that was also destroyed to the Borg. The woman also has connections to Guinan, whose race was another victim of the Borg's "assimilation," with the survivors scattered across the galaxy. Now Picard has to determine whether or not to join in the woman's quest for ultimate vengeance or seek a way to stop her before she destroys not only the Borg, but the Federation itself. Ultimately, it's a story analyzing just how far a person will go to gain revenge upon their enemies, and what humanity we lose in the process.

I've been trying to read The Night Land by W. H. Hodgson without much success. About the time I start to get through the strange prose into the meat of some story my brain is fatigued and I have to take a break. And then next time it starts all over again.

Do I now have a modern mil/zil-lennial brain with low attention span? Maybe, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying other books.

I'm going to wait for a vacation and get through all of it in a few sittings and maybe that will work.

Posted by: banana Dream at May 19, 2024 10:45 AM (wX5h4)

I had not heard of William Hope Hodgson's famous story until a few years ago. Hodgson was a fairly prolific author in his relatively short life. He died in 1918 during WWI when he was hit by an artillery shell at the ripe old age of 41. He did have a varied career, as he was a sailor and a champion for physical fitness before devoting his efforts full time to writing. Over the years, he's been a highly influential author in the horror and science fiction genres, though I would not be surprised if you've never heard of him. Colorful character in real life, tragic death, wild story-telling.

The original version of The Night Land is often hard for modern readers to get into because Hodgson is attempting a 17th-century style of storytelling, at least for the first part of the book. A 17th-century nobleman is given a vision of the far distant future when he will be reunited with his lost love, in a world that has been consumed by darkness. The sun has been consumed (or destroyed) and the last remnants of humanity have established a bastion called the Last Redoubt, surrounded by a barrier drawn from the Earth Current for protection against the nightmarish horrors that seek to devour the last humans. Humans have developed psychic gifts that can offer them protection, but also leave them vulnerable to having their souls destroyed if the wrong entities are allowed in.

Like banana dream, I tried reading it, but didn't get very far. However, I did read a series of novellas by science fiction author John C. Wright that take place within the same universe: Awake in the Night Land. I found them exceptionally creepy and disturbing as Wright draws upon every cosmic horror/alien trope he can think of to paint a truly awful picture of humanity's fate in the far distant future. However, even in those dark times, hope abides, creating light in the darkness. Good stuff. Highly recommended.

A more modern version of The Night Land has been written by James Stoddard to make the story a bit more accessible to readers who may be driven off by the overly archaic language of the original.

Masters of horror H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were both directly inspired by William Hope Hodgson. In Lovecraft's case, it's easy to see why. Many of Hodgson's horror stories involve the seas and oceans across which he sailed. Lovecraft *hated* the seas with a fiery passion and that hatred manifests itself in numerous stories (a lot of awful Lovecraftian horror comes from the depths of the oceans, like the Great One Cthulhu itself.)

Gene Wolfe was also inspired by Hodgson when writing his Book of the New Sun, which takes place on a fading earth in the far, far distant future.

I suspect--but cannot prove--that Jim Butcher's Cinder Spires may also be influenced by Hodgson's The Night Land as it features an earth that has been invaded by cosmic horrors from beyond, while humanity retreats to the titular Spires for protection. The neo-Victorian vibe of the setting would fit in with Hodgson's style as well.

NOTE: The Night Land is in the public domain and is available for free at Project Gutenberg.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

Back to books . . . I just finished Patrick Taylor's first in his series, An Irish Country Doctor. Fun stuff, with humor, even some physical comedy. The sort of story PBS once upon a time would have done as a mini-series (or maybe they have?), or which would have shown up in the Reader's Digest Condensed Books in the '60s or '70s. It's set in about 1965 in Ireland, too, so there are references to the "recent" death of JFK, the Beatles, and "this new group the Rolling Stones." I'll see if the library has books two and three.

Posted by: Wolfus Aurelius, Dreaming of Elsewhere at May 19, 2024 09:20 AM (wX5h4)

Comment: Looks like there are around 16 books (so far) in the series. OrangeEnt recently sent me an email wondering if writing a continuing series about a main character is a cheap way of writing. Personally, I think a lot of it is driven by the market. If people enjoy reading more stories about the same character, then they will ask for more stories and the publisher will try to comply. It's happened a lot. Of course, the characters can grow stale over time, so authors do need to find ways to keep their characters fresh and interesting for the reader or they will tune out.

I'm reading Kala by Colin Walsh. Set in today's Ireland in a tiny village way west near the seacoast, a reunion has brought friends back 13 years after (more about "after" later) a girl in their group went missing when they were all teenagers.

Very good piece of writing. I think it won some awards.

Irish say the word "after" as a weird way of doing past tense verbs.

"I'm after visiting this thread," would be said instead of "I visited this thread."

You'll find some saying that it is their usage of the "imposed" language, English being the language of the oppressors that forced its usage. Maybe Gaelic has a form for it. I don't know.

Who is your favorite Irish? The one you like listening to their speech?

For me it's Domhnall Gleeson, and if I can pick a woman, too, it's Maria Doyle Kennedy. Remember her in "The Commitments?"

Posted by: Mr Gaga at May 19, 2024 09:26 AM (wX5h4)

Comment: Successfully capturing a local dialect of speech in writing is an art form. If it's overdone, it can be offputting to the reader, though. In The Wonderland Gambit by Jack L. Chalker, he tries to insert a character with an extreme Southern accent. Because of the way Chalker writes the character's speech phonetically on the page, it makes it very difficult to read that character's lines of dialog, so I tended to gloss over that character's speech. On the other hand, Alan Dean Foster's use of a Cockney accent for Mudge the Otter in his Spellsinger series made that character just that much more hilarious. The Irish, of course, have their very own distinctive native accent, which will also vary by county within Ireland. You can pick up on where a person is from just from their pattern of speech. Though it's difficult to represent this accurately in written dialog.

Reading Gai-Jin, the third book in James Clavell's Asian Saga, (following, chronologically, Shogun and Tai Pan). This book is set in Japan in 1862, toward the end of the Tokagawa Shogunate that began at the end of Shogun, and involves the trading companies and descendents introduced in Tai Pan.

As with all of Clavell's novels, it is very good and I'm enjoying it immensely. I am, however, rushing through it a bit, as I really want to get to the very first novel he wrote, King Rat, which is about his experiences as a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Changi prison camp from 1942 to 1945, and then on to his classic doorstop about Hong Kong in 1963, Noble House.

Easily my second or third-favorite author.

Posted by: Sharkman at May 19, 2024 09:32 AM (wX5h4)

Comment: For some reason, I tend to get James Clavell mixed up with James Michener. Both of them wrote doorstoppers. Both of them wrote historical fiction. Both of them have had their works adapted into other media. And they both died within just a few years of each other (Clavell in 1994 and Michener in 1997). I wonder if anyone has considered writing a cross-over series featuring characters from both Clavell's works and Michener's works...

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (1000+ Moron-recommended books!)

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

Dragonlance - Defenders of Magic Vol. 1 - Night of the Eye by Mary Kirchoff

A young man flees an unfortunate situation where he'll be forced to marry a rather unpleasant woman for political and economic advantage so that he can become one of the famed mages of Krynn. Unbeknownst to him, his apprenticeship is part of a scheme to get him out of the way while the villain of the story schemes to open a gateway to the Lost Citadel, the repository of all magical knowledge of the gods. As Dragonlance stories go, it's all right. Just a bit of entertaining fluff using the rules of Dragonlance and Dungeons and Dragons as part of the story itself. We do get to see a few characters from the original Dragonlance stories--particularly Justinian, who eventually becomes the Master of the Red Robes (one of the three factions of magic-users). Even though this is listed as Book 1 of a trilogy, it's really a stand-alone novel, as the next book in the series has a time skip and focuses on Guerrand's young nephew.

Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars Book 1 - The Mandalorian Armor by K. W. Jeter

This is part of the Star Wars: Legends canon, which was destroyed by Disney when Disney took over the Star Wars universe. It also features a different backstory for Boba Fett than that seen in the prequel trilogy, as the book came out in 1998 (Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace was released in theaters in 1999). We also get a very different view of the fabled Mandalorians than we see in later stories after author Karen Traviss turned them into her personal fetish. This story does tie into another standalone book, Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry, as the main villain is Prince Xixor, leader of the Black Sun criminal faction and rival to Darth Vader for Emperor Palpatine's attention. Here, we also get to see what happens to Boba Fett after he escapes being digested by the mighty Sarlaac. In the old canon, Fett escaped the Sarlaac Pit and destroys the creature/plant/fungus/whatever, though different canons show slighly different stories. I have an old Star Wars comic that shows him meeting up with Han Solo after being thrown up by the Sarlaac.

Star Trek: The Original Series #36 - How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford

Werewife recommended this to me last week. I have owned it for a many, many years, but have not reread it for decades, so I had no remembrance of what it was about. It's a very silly book. It's a combination of satire, parody, musical, and farce. Also, there's a pie fight between humans and Klingons. Out of all of the Star Trek novels I've read, it does not take itself seriously at all, but it doesn't disrespect the source material, either. All of the characters from the Enterprise act as you would expect them to, even though they find themselves in increasingly absurd situations. Just a fun, goofy book.

The Face by Dean Koontz

This is the second recommendation from werewife from last week. The library in which I work, but do not work for, had it available for checkout, so why not? This is about a Hollywood celebrity who is receiving increasingly disturbing "messages" from a mysterious stalker who clearly means to do the celebrity harm. The celebrity's chief of security is a former LAPD detective and uses his knowledge, skills, and former connections to track down the perp.

Forgotten Realms - The Harpers Book 11 - Curse of the Shadowmage by Mark Anthony

This is a sequel to a previous book in the series, Crypt of the Shadowking. It's part of the open-ended series of novels featuring the Harpers, the do-gooders of the Realms to like to poke their noses into other peoples' business. In this case, a couple of renegade Harpers are seeking the hero from the previous book who may have gone over to the dark side...

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 05-19-24 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

Disclaimer: No Morons were harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. This week's recommendations are brought to you by the letters "w," "X,", and "h," and by the numbers "5," and "4."

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

| Access Comments