Sunday Morning Book Thread - 10-20-2024 ["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 (WARNING! Not Cover art is not for the squeamish!). 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?

Prayers for safe travels for all Morons returning home from another fabulous TXMOME!

PIC NOTE

The Malleus Maleficarum is a notorious book, the "Hammer of Witches," a how-to guide on dealing with them harshly, as the Lord commands (or so the authors claim, of course). I'll steal a page from Kamala Harris and plagiarize Wikipedia here:

The Malleus Maleficarum asserts that three elements are necessary for witchcraft: the evil intentions of the witch, the help of the Devil, and the permission of God. The treatise is divided into three sections. The first section is aimed at clergy and tries to refute critics who deny the reality of witchcraft, thereby hindering its prosecution.

The second section describes the actual forms of witchcraft and its remedies. The third section is to assist judges confronting and combating witchcraft, and to aid the inquisitors by removing the burden from them. Each of the three sections has the prevailing themes of what is witchcraft and who is a witch.

REFERENCE:

Malleus Maleficarum. (2024, August 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum

TREASURE TROVE OF RARE BOOKS

Poet Malcolm Guite, whom I've featured here before, visited the University of Oklahoma to deliver a speech and he discovered a treasure trove of rare books within the university's vast collection. It's quite impressive. I really like the reading room he visits at the end of this video as it looks very comfy and cozy. I'd love to curl up with one of those rare books in that room and just leaf through it. I'm a little surprised he was not required to wear white cotton gloves while handling those books, some of which are centuries old.

The university where I work has a few old books, but nothing quite like that (it's a small campus).

WHY EVERYONE STOPPED READING

According to Jared, there are three main reasons why students can't read at a college level:

1. Students are NOT being taught how to read starting in grade school, as we've discussed here before. They are NOT using the proven strategy of learning phonics in order to master reading. This holds them back even as they are passed on to the next grade level, so by the time they reach junior high, tremendous damage has been done. When they get to college, they simply do not have the capacity to read a college-length text at a college level.
2. When students get to the higher grade levels, the types of texts they are expected to read can be broken down into two main categories: informational texts and the fragments found in standardized tests. They are taught how to find key pieces of information within a text, but are not taught how to properly analyze literature to uncover themes, narrative structure, character development, world building, etc. In addition, many children are subject to reading programs like Accelerated Reading which channel their reading towards very specific stories which may not interest them or even hold them back when they try to progress beyond their AR level.
3. The development of technology like smart phones and social media has greatly reduced the attention span of children so that they are no longer able to focus on a given text for any meaningful length of time. This is compounded by students also being diagnosed as ADHD and heavily medicated. So now students are drugged while forced to read boring texts that they don't like.

As a result of the above issues, by the time students arrive in college, they no longer have the desire to read or to become lifelong readers. And most college textbooks--particularly in STEM courses--are NOT written with the student in mind. They are written by academics for textbook companies. They are vetted by other academics to ensure that the content is accurate, but they do not do a very good job of presenting the material in a way that beginning students can understand. So students never read their assigned textbooks.

I don't have any answers on how to fix this, but a great place to start is to teach students proper reading skills using phonics instruction from early on (as I was taught) and then proceed from there.

It really is a shame that many, many people in America no longer have the ability to read books for any length of time, so they give up and never become lifelong readers.

BOOKS BY MORON AUTHORS

Mark Ehrlich reached out to me from Korea about his first novel, Float the Boat, which has won a few awards (check out his website in the blurb below):

Float the Boat by Mark S. Ehrlich

It's December 2017 and consultant Nick Harmon is screwed. When he finds his ex-flame murdered the night before a reunion, police suspect he's the long-hibernating Surf Club Killer. Nick has his own theory too: that Adnan Sulaiman, the event's guest-of-honor, copycat-killed her. Backing it up only sinks him deeper into suspicion. But Nick's unconcerned. Even if he cuts his own throat, he's going to make Sulaiman pay.

​Adnan Sulaiman's latest deal will make real estate history. But the Indonesian billionaire now stands accused of murder. Not by DC police, by a dead woman he never met and a cabal of media loudmouths. The bad news goes global fast. One partner bails, others waiver, and protesters mass at headquarters. He's in the fight of his life and won't back down.

​Detective Steve Caine designates Nick the key suspect and Sulaiman a longshot. But is either man the elusive serial killer? Troubling inconsistencies mount, and unanswered questions dog him. Then a reporter breaks news about crucial evidence. One murderer or two? And if the Surf Club Killer's in town, when will he carve another wave?

www.markserlich.com

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

The Last Dangerous Visions has some awfully good stories in it; not sure you could call them 'dangerous' now, though some of them might have been in the 70s. The opening essays by J. M. Straczynski have a lot of information about how Harlan Ellison's career in general and this book in particular were affected by his illnesses. Well worth a read.

Posted by: Just Some Guy at October 13, 2024 09:20 AM (q3u5l)

Comment: Yeah, these stories might have been "dangerous" if they had been published back in the early to mid-1970s, when The Last Dangerous Visions was supposed to be published. But these stories have languished in development for *decades* and therefore don't carry quite the same stigma of being transgressive against the cultural norms. Just read the news today--or J.J. Sefton's excellent Morning Report--and you'll find REAL stories that would have shocked even the more progressive types to the core back then.

This week I finished up World Walkers by Neal Asher. Asher is in my opinion the finest science fiction writer working today. All of his books are very technically savvy and regularly introduce brtilliant new ideas and concepts. I also appreciate that he is writing sci-fi and not woke-fi, even though he is published by Tor.

World Walkers is different. The Asher signature is there all through the book, but I think the pandemic lockdowns broke him from the consensus narrative. Previously staying apolitical, World Walkers explicitly goes into the expected consequences of the oncoming social credit system. Social Assets (SA) above Zero Assets (ZA), all under the Bureaucracy, which governs nominal nation-states but in reality is run by the multi-national elite. Live in the pods, eat the bugs, and those who step out of line get harvested by the shepherds.

Really a scary, excellent work. I can only hope Asher keeps getting published by Trad Pub.

Posted by: Candidus at October 13, 2024 10:29 AM (d5aIs)

Comment: I have never heard of this author before, but I looked him up on Amazon and then went over to his website to see what he has to say. He's British, so he no doubt has a slightly different perspective on "social credit" than Americans do, but he seems less woke than most, or even anti-woke. Apparently, he's as dispirited by the wokeness in modern literature as the rest of us. He recently went on a reading hiatus, but then discovered Larry Correia's fun and exciting Monster Hunter series, which then led him to Jim Butcher's also fun and exciting Dresden Files series. I recommend both for anyone who likes urban fantasy with lots of destruction...Neither author holds back on the action when it's time to throw down with the bad guys...

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.

Book of the Gods Volume 1 - The Face of Apollo by Fred Saberhagen

It's been a bit difficult to get into the book. Saberhagen takes way too long to any real action. The worldbuilding also feels a bit "off." He uses Greco-Roman names for his gods, and the story *appears* to take place in Ancient Greece, but the names of characters don't fit. The main character is named "Jeremy Redthorn" and that doesn't quite seem Greek to me. Other names like "Lynn" and "Humbert" also feel non-Greek. The world itself feels both ancient and futuristic/post-apocalyptic at the same time, which is a bit jarring. Anyway, it's not Saberhagen's best work, though it's entertaining enough for me to plow through it. Just not quite as enjoyable as Dean Koontz or Brandon Sanderson.

The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz

As with most Dean Koontz novels I've read so far, this one is an easy, breezy read, despite its rather grim subject matter. A brutal serial killer is stalking the streets of New York City. Only a clairvoyant may be able to uncover his true identity and bring him to justice. The killer knows about the clairvoyant and stalks him down in his own office building while the clairvoyant must face his deepest fears in order to escape the killer's wrath.

Written in the late 1970s under a pen name--"Brian Coffey"--this is Koontz tackling the grim, seedy underbelly of NYC life during that time. No computers, no cell phones, no DNA tracing, just one man's unpredictable ability to divine details of the killer from psychic emanations. Oh, there is a dog in the story (this is Koontz, after all), but he seems to play a minor role.

The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs

This is by far one of my favorite creepy books. It's about two wizards who are caught up in a supernatural battle with another wizard who has unlocked the secrets of a diabolical tome that allows the enemy wizard to rewrite reality to suit his whims. It's a genuinely dark and spooky story. It's also amazing how John Bellairs can pack a *ton* of story into a mere 174 pages. His prose is amazing.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 10-13-2024 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

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

Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. Beware of dying women bearing ancient masks of a dead god...

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

| Access Comments