Sunday Morning Book Thread - 3-23-2025 ["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?

PIC NOTE

Tornados are nature's assholes. Capricious, destructive, and utterly without mercy. Yet, through some miracle, the EF2 tornado that plagued my town on Friday, March 14, managed to avoid the two main population centers in town, driving a line right between them. Yes, it did destroy a few houses and buildings, and knocked out power to my neighborhood for three days. But it could have been much, much worse. I'm very grateful for the hard workers who were able to restore power in such a short amount of time. I'm also grateful for the countless volunteers who pulled out their chainsaws to clean up the damage. The pic above shows what happens when an EF3 tornado hits a library. It's not pretty.

WHERE IS ASGARD?

Although the MCU has popularized Asgard as its own celestial body located somewhere out in the cosmos, that's not how the ancient people in Scandinavia would have regarded it. Instead, ancient people around the world, regardless of culture or society, believed in "unseen realms" hidden all around us, but inaccessible to mortals unless they stumbled across them or found a key to a portal that would take them there. Although the ancients knew about the planets (the word for planet comes from a Greek word meaning "wanderer") as they could see them wandering around the night sky, they didn't understand the relationship between planets and stars, nor how far away they were from Earth. It was much easier for them to accept the idea of "hidden worlds" surrounding ours, populated by strange creatures and powerful gods.

BOOKLAND

I found it interesting that the ISBN uses 978 (and also 979 now) as the "country code" for books. I knew UPCs had a specific code for categories of books and I had noticed a correlation between the UPC and ISBN but hadn't really put the two together quite like it's described in the video above. "Bookland" is an independent nation, I guess, with no government to speak of, other than an influence on the printing business to ensure that all books printed today have an appropriate ISBN so that they can be catalogued. I know that I appreciate having ISBNs as it makes it so easy to add books to the Moron Recommendations on our Libib site.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

Of course, if you mention Ambrose Bierce, he's probably now best remembered for his Devil's Dictionary - a collection of sardonic, cynical definitions of words.

The edition to get, is The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary edited by Ernest J. Hopkins. Published in 1967, this version includes an additional 851 words to Bierce's 1000 words included in the book published in 1911. Hopkins culled the old San Francisco newspapers and discovered that Bierce had actually started his project in 1875. Hopkins speculates that Bierce couldn't access old newspaper files because he was now in the East, and San Francisco was still recovering from the 1906 earthquake.

Highly recommended if you're a Bierce complete-ist, collect dictionaries, or a student of word usage.

Posted by: Retired Buckeye Cop is now an engineer at March 16, 2025 09:07 AM (pJWtt)

Comment: Honestly, when I hear Ambrose Bierce, I think of his classic short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" instead of The Devil's Dictionary. That's the first story of his I read way back in high school AP English class.

I've been reading Malcolm Guite's The Word in the Wilderness. He regards Lent and Easter as a journey with Christ's last days on Earth and what we learn from them. He has chosen poetry as the way to bring these lessons to life. Arranged as a devotional, each poem, by many poets, and his commentary are inspiring and bring an understanding of the pains and triumph of Christ's journey. I wish religion (and faith) had been explained in such a way when I was young. Instead of Lent being just a mechanical exercise of giving up 'something' and no meat on Friday, the lessons of His path would have been a foundation for a fuller, more meaningful faith.

Posted by: JTB at March 16, 2025 10:02 AM (yTvNw)

Comment: It is Easter season, a time for us Christians to reflect on the priceless gift we've been given by His sacrifice. When I was a kid, Easter meant a visit from the Easter bunny with lots of candy. Now I take it a lot more seriously because I have grown in wisdom and experience (somewhat) and can now appreciate what that sacrifice has meant for mankind.

Think I've mentioned it before, but one of my favorite Crichton's was an early thriller he wrote under the John Lange pseudonym. The book is called Binary. The plot involves a planned nerve gas attack during a political convention; the agent who has to stop it finds that his personnel files and psych profiles have been accessed by the man planning the attack, so his approaches to problems have been factored into the attack plans. He has to outsmart the attacker, but to do that he also has to outsmart himself. Nice little thriller. They did a movie of the week from it in the 70s, called Pursuit with Ben Gazzara and E. G. Marshall.

Posted by: Just Some Guy at March 16, 2025 09:48 AM (q3u5l)

Comment: Outsmarting a villain smarter than yourself is always a challenge, especially when you have high intelligence already like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. It's even harder when you *know* that you may have above average intelligence but aren't a genius and your opponent *is* a genius.

MORE MORON RECOMMENDATIONS CAN BE FOUND HERE: AoSHQ - Book Thread Recommendations

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.

Bloodlines by F. Paul Wilson

This was laying on top of a stack of books in my bedroom, as I've officially run out of shelves. I grabbed it because it was handy and because I wanted something different to read. This is part of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series, which is itself part of a larger narrative Wilson calls "The Secret History of the World." Jack (the only name he answers to, preferring NOT to have a last name) is called upon to track down a young woman who has gotten involved with a man twice her age. The girl's mother wants Jack to break up that relationship. Throughout the story, we find out the depraved details about that relationship (involves incest), as well as hints about a much darker plan involving the "Otherness," that inimical, inscrutable being who is seeking to invade our world and claim it for its own purposes.

Harbingers by F. Paul Wilson

After reading Bloodline, I decided to backtrack in the Repairman Jack series and read the book immediately preceding Bloodline, Harbingers. In this one, Jack is confronted by the purpose for which he has been chosen by the Ally, who is only slightly less dangerous than the Otherness, and seeks to prevent the Otherness from claiming Earth. However, Jack, as the Heir of the Ally's current champion discovers the price for being the Heir and wants nothing to do with it. He's prepared to give up the world to the Otherness so that he doesn't have to pay that price.

The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell

This is an excellent anthology of classic horror stories. Although I've read many of them elsewhere, there are plenty of stories that are new to me, though I've heard of most of the authors. In the first third of this doorstopper, we have classics such as "The Crowd" by Ray Bradbury, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch, and "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, which is really three stories in one, all linked by a strange, diabolic statue discovered at multiple locations. It also features a Norwegian sailor ramming his boat right in great Cthulhu's face, which is pretty badass. (Minor spoiler: the sailor survived, though his sanity suffered, of course.)<

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

Through the magic of Project Gutenberg and Amazon's Kindle app, I downloaded a public-domain copy of George MacDonald's classic story, which has been mentioned here before. It reads like a children's fairy tale, with a young princess trapped in a castle (though she's lives like a princess), a humble young hero who will protect her, and evil monsters (the goblins) that want to capture her. I can see how MacDonald influenced both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 3-16-2025 (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. The Emerald City is a lovely place to visit but no one wants to live there.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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