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« Daily Tech News 9 March 2025 | Main | Is Virulent Jew-Hate The Only Free Speech Allowed At Columbia University? »
March 09, 2025

Sunday Morning Book Thread - 3-9-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]


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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, set your clocks back an hour (you heard me), and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?


PIC NOTE

Moron mindful webworker sent this to me, though he was unclear of whether it was a picture of HIS bathroom reading material or someone else's. Still, gotta admit there's a fair amount of material there. Full disclosure: Contrary to what you might suspect, I do NOT have a bookshelf in either of my two bathrooms. In fact, those are the only rooms in the house that are lacking books. However, there are two full bookshelves within arms length of the door into either bathroom. Draw your own conclusions from that.

MARCH MYSTERY MADNESS

I wanted to expand my reading a bit for March, so I decided that I was going to read mysteries this month instead of my usual fantasy and science fiction fare. In fact, before I became an avid devotee of fantasy and science fiction, I primarily read mystery and suspense stories. I grew up reading The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators when I was just a young squirrel leaping through the treetops. I also read quite a few of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents... series of books. I didn't gravitate towards science fiction/fantasy until I was twelve or so. Before that, it was mostly mystery stories.

When it comes to crime stories, crimes generally consist of the following three elements, each of which is present in some fashion in a good mystery story:

  • MEANS - Does the criminal have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to carry out the crime? If there are multiple suspects, or multiple means of accomplishing the feat, which suspect is most likely to have the combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities for achieving their goal?
  • MOTIVE - Which of the suspects in a crime has the greatest motive for committing the crime? Again, if multiple suspects are in play, do they have competing motives? And if so, which motive can be eliminated to reveal the actual criminal?
  • OPPORTUNITY - Of those who have both the skills and the motive for committing the crime, who among them had the greatest opportunity to commit the crime? When exquisite timing is called for, who was in the right place at the right time to commit murder/steal the jewels/etc.?

To the list above, I would also add the following, as Agatha Christie mentions in several of her Hercule Poirot stories:

  • TEMPERAMENT - Even if someone has all of the requisite skills, greatest motive, and the prime opportunity, do they have the true desire to commit their crime? Can they find it deep within their heart to murder someone in cold blood and then act as if nothing has happened to throw coppers off their scent? It takes a stone-cold killer to murder someone, a true psychopath. Consider the narrators in Edgar Allan Poe's classic stories, "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." In one instance, the narrator casually walls up his victim in a cellar for some perceived slight. Then proceeds to think nothing more of the incident. In the latter story, while the narrator initially gets away with his crime, even inviting the police in to investigate the scene of the crime, eventually his guilty conscience gets the better of him and he confesses his foul deed while standing over the hidden remains of his victim.

Returning to detective stories has been a refreshing break from my usual fare, so I suspect I shall continue to read mysteries throughout March. I have some great books lined up...

++++++++++



(Now that I've read Agatha Christie, I understand why this is funny.)

++++++++++

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY -- REAL-LIFE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO



Fun trivia - the father of Alexander Dumas, who was the real life Napoleonic War hero whose life Alexander idealized in all of his works, was half black. You can see Alexander's heritage clearly if you look up a picture of him. Posted by: Tom Servo at March 02, 2025 09:14 AM (SSRw1)

I know a few of you have read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The video above popped into my YouTube feed recently (probably been scanning the comments of AoSHQ...). It's a great look at the inspiration for one of the greatest novels of all time. It's also a reminder that life is often stranger than fiction and that great authors draw upon historical inspiration for epic stories.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

I also read Military Life under Napoleon: The Memoirs of Captain Elzear Blaze translated by John Elting. Published in 1995, this was the first unabridged English translation with a little Appendix about Capt. Blaze's military record. Blaze wrote with a rather chatty, stream-of-consciousness style. He covered many subjects such as life on the march, in camp, battle and rationing. Some of the stories go a bit long.

Capt. Blaze was rather perplexed with the Spanish. He didn't grasp why they would stay defeated. Not being particularly devout himself, he didn't understand that Catholic Spain saw fighting the atheistic French as a Crusade. He admits that beautiful paintings were stolen from Spanish churches, and Jerome Napoleon's government was trying to close monasteries, etc. Col. Elting provides numerous footnotes to enhance the modern reader's understanding of Capt. Blaze's references to early 19th C. Frech life. (I didn't like Elting's snarky footnote that the Spanish monks and priests became guerrillas because they didn't want to work).

Rating = 4.0/5.0. If you want a company-grade officer's view of life in the Grand Armee, this is a book for you.

Posted by: Retired Buckeye Cop is now an engineer at March 02, 2025 09:24 AM (pJWtt)

Comment: I don't have much to say about this book, as Retired Buckeye Cop seems to have captured the essence of the story. Military life at the time was undoubtedly unpleasant and difficult, like it's always been throughout history.

+++++

In between the comics and old pulp stories, I've been re-reading a little bit of non-fiction: The Great Divide by Peter Watson. It's an exploration of the cultural differences between the old world cultures and the new world cultures. I'm still in the early part of the book, where he's discussing the current (2010) scholarship regarding how/when people first came to the new world. Lots of speculation and broad timescales here.

And some fun analysis of comparative creation stories! Lots of flood stories, the world coming forth out of the water... One interesting thing that was mentioned was that light occurring before the sun happens in origin stories even beyond the Biblical one. Watson wants to tie that to memories of something like the Toba volcano eruption, which may have put enough dust into the atmosphere to actually block out the sun.

Anyways, the book has lots of fun speculation, which usually sets me off daydreaming, trying to incorporate some of the proposed-deep-history into some fantasy epic I'll never actually write. A post-cataclysmic world, where the remnants of humanity live in eternal dusk, where dragons can swoop out of the haze without warning...

Posted by: Castle Guy at March 02, 2025 09:41 AM (Lhaco)

Comment: The rise and fall of civilizations across the globe is fascinating. Why do some cultures thrive and advance and others do not? Why did the Chinese and European cultures achieve tremendous technological success compared to cultures in Africa? It's also interesting to note the commonalities among cultures, particularly when it comes to origin stories. Many ancient cultures have legends and myths of a Great Flood occurring thousands of years ago. Numerous authors have used these ancient cultures for inspiration for both fantasy and science fiction stories...

+-----+-----+-----+-----+

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

  • Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock - Part of the extended Eternal Champion series. It's a vast, complicated world out there...
  • Easter: The Rest of the Story by Rick Renner - The sequel to his earlier Christmas - The Rest of the Story (2022).

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.


hercule-poirot-casebook.jpg

Hercule Poirot's Casebook by Agatha Christie

One of the oddest aspects of reading these stories is the sense that I've read them before. Most likely, I've seen adaptations of these stories in some fashion or another on television. Each of the stories could easily be turned into an episode of a detective series--and most of them probably have been at some time in the past 40 years or so. They seem very cliche, but these are actually the stories that *began* the cliche. I've enjoyed them quite a bit. Agatha Christie is well aware that she's drawing inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and frequently puts in affection digs at Holmes. Poirot is quite different from Holmes, being a man who is fond of order and stability in his life, though he takes a very similar approach to solving crimes, relying on his own intellect to solve the mystery at hand. Good stuff.


house-of-usher.jpg

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

I found this book on a community library shelf in the English department where I work. I was surprised to discover that I've already read quite a few stories as I've studied Poe in a number of my English courses in high school and college. This particular edition contains Poe's only full-length novel, Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, a story of a man who goes to sea to find adventure and discovers far more than he bargained for.

When it comes to writing style, there's a very distinct contrast between Christie and Poe. Christie's style is crisp and fast-paced. Lots of dialog between characters as elements of the mystery are revealed to the reader throughout Poirot's investigation. By contrast, Poe's style is much slower and more ponderous. He uses lengthy exposition to establish the mood of the story, taking several paragraphs to describe something as simple as a dark and stormy sea.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 3-2-2025 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

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


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Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. DOGE will investigate Daylight Savings Time to find out what happened to all those missing hours.

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posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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