Sunday Morning Book Thread - 09-08-2024 ["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...

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

Congratulations to pookysgirl and her family! We have another addition to the Moron Horde!

Happy Birthday to Hadrian the Seventh!

PIC NOTE

My cat Allie has recently become very attached to me, following me around the house, rubbing up against me, and so forth. It only took her two full years to reach this point. In the picture above, she is curled up on top of the bookshelves that sit behind my office chair in my home office. She looks happy and content. Underneath her, on the top shelf, are F. Paul Wilson's novels from his Secret History of the World series, which are arranged in roughly chronological order. Most of them are from his Repairman Jack series, but there is also crossover with his Adversary Cycle.

I liked this picture so much, I now use it for the wallpaper background on my smart phone.

READING BOOKS PICKED BY OTHERS

The BookTuber above took on a self-imposed challenge by reading books selected for him by his Patreons. Every month, he chose one book at random from their recommendations and then read and reviewed the book. Although he enjoyed the challenge, he admits that he did not like all of the books that were selected, so sometimes it was a chore to finish each book. He was very pleasantly surprised by other selections, however, which made the challenge worth it.

I'm not sure if I could ever do that, though I might try something similar for 2025. Perhaps I should try to read/review a Moron Recommendation each month. I won't do it at random, though, as I know there are books out there that will *not* like, but I could expand my horizons and try something outside my usual comfort zone. After all, it's thanks to you guys that I embraced Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child as well as Dean Koontz.

POETRY READING FROM MALCOLM GUITE

This YouTube video showed up in my queue recently. I know Malcolm Guite has been recommended around here more than once, so I thought I'd give it a watch. I was very pleasantly entertained. His premise is that there are many untold stories within the Arthurian legend, especially about his childhood years. How did Arthur and Merlin actually meet? What was the first magic Merlin shared with Arthur? Guite tells a great story about how the future King of the Britons first met Merlin, and the lesson that was imparted to the young squire on that day.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ORANGEENT!

OrangeEnt announced last weekend that a story of his was accepted by a magazine for publication.

Here are the details:

Well, I finally "sold" a story. An internet magazine, Frontier Tales, accepted it for publication on their website. Writers get no money, but can purchase the print magazine at a reduced price and resell on their own. Not the most optimal outcome, but getting a publishing credit is the first hurdle for a new writer to cross. They sell a print anthology on Amazon. To get into the collection, you have to be voted the top story of the issue. Readers can vote at www.FrontierTales.com. You'll need to provide an e-mail to vote. I would appreciate, if anyone's interested, to go and vote for my story. It's "The Waystation Incident," by Aitch Enfield in the September issue.

I suppose next I'll need to make an author's page. Any ideas for free hosting?

I'm not suggesting that the Moron Horde go to FrontierTales.com and vote for "The Waystation Incident" like it's the only candidate for office in a Philadelphia precinct, but I would not be surprised if it happened.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

In his novel Down to a Sunless Sea, David Poyer shows us the black, deadly world of cave diving. Commercial diver Tiller Galloway goes to Florida to help line up a dive shop for sale that was owned by his recently deceased friend, Bud Kusczk. What Tiller finds is that Bud seemed to make a lot of money from his shop, Tiller knows it wasn't from training divers, and Bud seemed to make regular solo trips into a certain cave system. Suddenly, Bud's death seems a lot more suspicious.

Diving in a cave adds a massive complication to an already complex activity. The only light is what the diver brings, and one carries a limited supply of their life support with them. Every move and breath must be measured. You cannot race to the surface if your air runs out; you die. If you get stuck, you die.

Poyer has obviously spent time in underwater caves, as he perfectly describes the claustrophobic, utterly dark and inherently deadly waters that lie beneath the Florida landmass. Divers' bodies are recovered each year from her caves, and those that regularly enter these passages are a select few. Making this the backdrop for a mystery makes the cave a menacing, sinister accomplice.

Posted by: Thomas Paine at September 01, 2024 09:25 AM (mzB36)

Comment: Cave diving is one of those activities that sounds interesting in theory, but is terrifying in practice. Nope. Just nope. It's so easy to get turned around down there and lose your way. If you get stuck, that's it. You aren't coming back up again.

Now that Dracula has been brought up, there's an opportunity to plug my favorite crossover novel, Sherlock Holmes: A Betrayal in Blood, by Mark A. Latham! Don't miss this one:

Holmes is presented with a singular problem: Why would the eminent Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and his respectable friends pursue and murder an eccentric Balkan gentleman and then put about a crazy story about said gentleman being some kind of blood-sucking ghoul?! Holmes and Watson investigate ... and every detail tracks perfectly with Stoker's book, but we're on Planet Holmes, where once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth ....

Posted by: werewife, princess of Delray Beach at September 01, 2024 09:43 AM (wwf+q)

Comment: Dracula--along with Victor Frankenstein--is one of those timeless public-domain characters that has shown up just about everywhere. I can buy into a Sherlock Holmes/Dracula cross-over if only because they were both active in late-Victorian London. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula combines Dracula with elements from Sherlock Holmes, and throws in Jack the Ripper for good measure. Holmes himself is mentioned a few times, but we never see him directly. We do see his brother Mycroft Holmes at the Diogenes Club.

The Unmothers by Leslie J.Anderson is a slow-burn horror set in rural horse country. After suffering the double blow of her husband's death and a miscarriage, reporter Carolyn Marshall is sent by her news team to cover a softball story assignment: travel to the little town of Raeford to see what's behind the claim that a horse gave birth to a human child.

It's obviously a hoax, but something is definitely going on and there are undercurrents of fear and violence. And there are strange folkways that aren't explained, like leaving bowls of milk and sugar on the tombstones at the church graveyard, to appease...what?

"...the weird silence, the slippery memory, the careful and selective turning away."

Posted by: All Hail Eris at September 01, 2024 09:49 AM (kpS4V)

Comment: Go far enough off the beaten path into the country, you may encounter all manner of strange customs and rituals that have no apparent purpose...But perhaps there is something lurking in those woods and down in those hollers that requires appeasing...Here, the bowls of milk and sugar hint at the possibility of encountering faerie creatures, who seem to enjoy these little gifts.

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

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

Kim Newman has a couple of Anno Dracula books that I needed to add to my collection:

• Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters -- We go to the Far East, where the vampires are just a wee bit different than the conventional nosferatu that originated in Eastern Europe.
• Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju -- A vampire agent of the famed Diogenes Club has to fight her way to the top of a building taken over by monsters. A bit like Die Hard if John McClane was a sword-wielding badass taking on yakuza mobsters who embraced the dark side of life...

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.

Time's Tapestry Book 4 - Weaver by Stephen Baxter

In the final volume of this series, we find out the end result of the ripples in time that have been implanted by the Weaver. What if the Nazis had successfully launched Operation Sea Lion and conquered the south-east corner of England? We follow the lives of several characters as they struggle to set right what once went wrong, Quantum Leap-style. All they have is fragments of lost prophecies to guide them and the knowledge that they were implanted deep in the past.

Time travel stories are among the most difficult to write well, because of the paradoxes that seem to follow in their wake. Stable time loops are one way to avoid many of those paradoxes, essentially creating a self-contained universe. However, that's not quite the case here, though I thought it might be. Definitely an interesting examination of how simple changes in the time stream could have catastrophic effects many centuries into the future.

Anno Dracula - Johnny Alucard by Kim Newman

The operating premise behind Newman's Anno Dracula series is that Dracula was a real creature that succeeded in taking over England in the late Victorian era. The story as told by Bram Stoker was a fictionalized version of real people and real events. Dracula was eventually thrown down from his perch behind the English throne and he was eventually destroyed for good in the 1950s. In the meantime, he spread vampirism around the world, bringing vampires out into the light of day, so to speak (they are still vulnerable to daylight unless they are *old* vampires). Vampires work and live among the "warm" (i.e., us), occasionally turning us, but mostly living off the blood of animals and willing donors.

Thanks to a couple of you Morons, I was inspired to finally getting around to reading this entry in the Anno Dracula series, and I ordered the remaining books as well. Newman plays fast and loose with historical and fictional characters, blending them together to build a unique world of monsters and myths. Not all vampires are evil blood-suckers--just most of them. In other words, transitioning to vampire status doesn't entirely remove our humanity. There are plenty of evil monsters, however, including the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracul.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 09-01-24 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

Tips, suggestions, recommendations, etc., can all be directed to perfessor -dot- squirrel -at- gmail -dot- com.

Medusa's Web by Tim Powers

I'm really not quite sure how to describe the plot in this book. It involves some sort of ancient conspiracy that is trying to obtain a special artifact that allows the viewer to travel psychically across time and space, backwards and forwards and inside out. The main characters Scott and his sister Madeline are caught up in events from their own past haunting them as they begin to unravel the truth about who they are.

The way that Powers describes the so-called "spiders"--mysterious glyphs that trap the viewer in splintered fragments of time--reminds me of the Elder Scrolls from the game franchise of the same name. Those artifacts also pierce the barriers of time and space, eventually causing the reader to become blind over time. Most people also go mad.

The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the third entry in The Long Earth saga. In the previous two books, the characters explored far out into the parallel Earths joined together like pearls on a necklace, but separated by a thin wall that can be penetrated by "Step" technology that allows the user to go from one variation of Earth to the next. Now, we get to see that Mars is also part of a continuum of parallel worlds, but not in the same sequence as Earth. Like one string that is entangled with another, touching only at certain points.

It's a strange series as we see all sorts of weirdness evolved across millions of parallel variations of Earth and Mars. And then we get to see the PERPENDICULAR worlds in a later novel...

(Huggy Squirrel dreams of patenting the first ever pimp-hat polishing machine.)

Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. The Children of the Night approve this message. Can't you hear their sweet music?

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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