Well, I just finished the first two "short espionage novels" from
the book I picked up at a thrift shop.
The first was The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, by Arthur
Conan Doyle.
A while back I read another book, Science: Good, Bad, Bogus, by Martin Gardner
where, writing as a skeptic, he doubts that Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes
stories because he was gullible, unscientific, illogical and easily taken in by
psychics, seances and fairies.
There is another book by John Allen, whoever that is, that postulates that
all the stories previous to The Final Problem, where Holmes and Moriarty
die in the Reichenbach Falls, were written by one person (possibly Doyle's wife)
and the later, inferior stories when Holmes is resurrected, by someone else.
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans falls into the category of
later, inferior stories. Mycroft Holmes visits his younger brother soliciting his
help in retrieving the plans for a submarine. The plans, themselves are
unbelievable- only ten pages of a size that fit into a coat pocket- when
even a simple building requires dozens of pages of blueprint size.
We are told that this is the only set of plans- also unbelievable- many
sets of plans are require for the construction of such complex technology.
Mycroft, who we have been told is as logical as Sherlock, says, "Surely
you have heard of it (the submarine)... It has been the most jealousy guarded of all
government secrets"- two statements that, together, make no sense- and
I don't think they were made ironically.
Sherlock, having no leads, asks Mycroft for a list of known spies, only
one seems a likely prospect. Mycroft is possibly smarter than Sherlock-
why didn't he think of that, and why are known spies running around free
to steal submarine plans?
The parts of the story that are not illogical and contrived are simplistic and
a bit repetitive and not very entertaining.
In the past I have enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories, but this one, from
the later "resurrection period" is below average and not recommended.
The Traitor, by Somerset Maugham, is a much better story. Maugham was
a member of British Intelligence during WWI, and his character, Ashenden,
a secret agent, seems realistic and believable. Everything in this story is
very low key and subtle. The "traps" are psychological. We get to understand
the spies, and feel a bit sorry for them in the end.
In one passage the author describes how Ashenden was always simultaneously
aware of a person's merits and their faults... and since he even judged his friends with
candor they never disappointed his and so he seldom lost one.
He was a spy, dealing with spies, who were, all-in-all, very much like himself.
I recommend this one.
I really like the original Sherlock Holmes. While the short stories in volume 2 are not as good as Volume 1, one the best novels The Hound of the Baskervilles is in the second volume. Interestingly I am re-watching Jeremy Brett’s episodes these days. While great, the thrill of reading the books is just higher.
I think I have said here many times that Maugham is one of my favorite writers. His range in terms of genres is just astounding. I am not surprised that he has done just as well in the spyverse too.
Read 2 more stories/short novels from the same collection-
Tokyo, 1941, by Cornell Woolrich
Woolrich tends to write dark/noir storied that focus on the baser human behaviors.
Unfortunately they also tend toward stereotypical characters and situations with corny dialogue.
The writing is also not very good. Here is an example-
Now, as he sat waiting he didn't want Matsuko to show up anymore. But that was alright, because Matsuko
didn't, in any case.
In general his characters are not likeable, but that might be OK if their behavior or the ending made sense.
The Giggle-Wrecker, by Peter O'Donnell
Was better than the Woolrich story.
It featured the character, Modesty Blaise who started out as a comic book character and also
appeared in movies. In this story the characters were not all that well developed. I think the reader
was expected to already know much of their history (which I did not). The plot was simple- Blaise was to rescue
a famous biologist from out of East Berlin, which she did by having him shot over the wall from a circus canon.
If that was not clever enough, it ended with an unexpected twist. Some goofy elements, decent writing,
but left me a bit "flat".
I turn page after page but I don't understand what I read because I am distracted. I can't transport myself back to the 19th century. That, or the Spanish translation I am reading is awful.
I really like the original Sherlock Holmes. While the short stories in volume 2 are not as good as Volume 1, one the best novels The Hound of the Baskervilles is in the second volume. Interestingly I am re-watching Jeremy Brett’s episodes these days. While great, the thrill of reading the books is just higher.
Unless you read a "primer", it's impossible to know what was going on at the time a novel was written and therefore impossible to understand "what's going on". Just to have someone walk you through the basics, this site works well. You can pay $10 and download as many "Lit Charts" as you want in a month. Hard to find a better deal.
From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Understand more, faster. Free!
www.litcharts.com
Personally, I also like to watch movies of books before I read them. So I know the story. Know the characters and can concentrate on some of the "themes" while reading. The BBC stuff from the 70's and 80's is very true to the novel. And nobody wants them, so they're dirt cheap too. You can find BBC mini-series versions of lots of major novels.
I turn page after page but I don't understand what I read because I am distracted. I can't transport myself back to the 19th century. That, or the Spanish translation I am reading is awful.
The book goes back and forth so yes a good translation is a must if you aren’t reading the original. Just curious though, you seem to be having a very good command of the English language. Why don’t you read these books in their original language?
The book goes back and forth so yes a good translation is a must if you aren’t reading the original. Just curious though, you seem to be having a very good command of the English language. Why don’t you read these books in their original language?
I actually don't think so about my digital reading levels, as I must have only read 10 to 15 books of that library in 4 years. I always prefer hard copies.
Agree. I strongly believe that the tactile memory of touching and turning the pages is valuable in a reading experience. I have a tome of specific series of books that I have a pdf version of (over 5000 pages in my native language). I completed over 75% of it and I have decided that I will buy the entire series in hardback copy instead. It costs quite a bit so I am saving for it since it’s a rare edition but it’s going to be worth it in my view. I can also make scribblings, notes, stick markers etc in physical books much better than on my admittedly older kindle.
Agree. I strongly believe that the tactile memory of touching and turning the pages is valuable in a reading experience. I have a tome of specific series of books that I have a pdf version of (over 5000 pages in my native language). I completed over 75% of it and I have decided that I will buy the entire series in hardback copy instead. It costs quite a bit so I am saving for it since it’s a rare edition but it’s going to be worth it in my view. I can also make scribblings, notes, stick markers etc in physical books much better than on my admittedly older kindle.
The problem to store paper books where I live is that after several years they turn yellowish and deteriorate a lot.
I think that my sons will not receive the books in good shape when the time comes.
The problem to store paper books where I live is that after several years they turn yellowish and deteriorate a lot.
I think that my sons will not receive the books in good shape when the time comes.
Yes. You can place neem leaves inside books. It prevents them from turning yellow. I understand what you say though although if your kids don’t read, it doesn’t matter
Yes. You can place neem leaves inside books. It prevents them from turning yellow. I understand what you say though although if your kids don’t read, it doesn’t matter
My wife was a librarian. In the last thirty years I have yet to see her actually read a book.
When she has trouble sleeping I always suggest she read a book.
Last night I tried to get her to read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
She got all the way to page 19 and claims she didn't sleep at all.
Anyway, it's a good book and I now recommend it to everyone else.
Just finished two more short espionage novels from the anthology mentioned above.
Octopussy, by ian Fleming. Fleming was a good writer. It is one thing to be technically
good and another to write an interesting, taut, believable, story that draws you into its
particular world. I read a Bond novel a while back that would have ended the same way
if James Bond were not in it at all. In this particular story Bond is barely in it at all.
It concerns a former military man who stole German gold bars and killed his guide.
Years later Bond, representing the English government shows up and tells him
the jig is up, they know what he did. Bond leaves, for reasons that don't make sense and the man
dies trying to feed a scorpion fish to his "pet" octopus. Back at headquarters they think
he committed suicide. Yawn, ho hum.
The Sizzling Saboteur, by Leslie Charteris (Simon Templar, The Saint) concerned a group of
foreign "agents" sabotaging American industrial plants. It started off quickly. The Saint
finds a burned corpse on a rural byway and becomes involved with a humorless chief
of police. There is lots of word play, references to other writers and "cleverness", but
after a while it just became kind of tedious with too much over-explaining and contrived
situations. I read some of Charteris's short stories that were more well constructed and I
wondered what a novel might be like. Now I know.
A while back I accidentally stumbled upon a (now out of print) series of books called The Adventure Library. The series consists of thirty adventure classics with topics including sailing, mountaineering, rafting, aviation, and just flat-out survival. The books are printed on high-quality paper and are handsomely bound. I like reading adventure stories, but am not familiar with the classics of the genre so I regard this set as a kind of recommendation of what to read.
The first book in the set is Endurance by Alfred Lansing. I wrote about the book several pages back on this thread. The second book in the set is K2: The Savage Mountain by various members of a team of Americans who attempted to be the first to climb the Himalayan K2 summit in 1953. Even though this must have been a gripping adventure -
They didn’t make it to the top and one of the team members was lost. His body was eventually found forty years later.
- I can’t recommend it as it turns out mountaineers don’t make very good writers especially when they each write separate chapters and then cobble them all together. The climbers write about what they did to prepare for, travel to, and then climb the mountain, but they don’t describe each other very well so the reader never gets a sense of who they are as people. As a result, the book reads as methodical but with little tension as it’s hard to be overly concerned about people we know almost nothing about.
I just finished reading the third book in the series: Running the Amazon by Joe Kane, a free-lance writer who has published articles in National Geographic and The New Yorker. Running the Amazon is about a bunch of people who wanted to be the first in recorded history (this is the 1980's) to paddle the entire length of the Amazon River starting at its headwaters high in the Andes mountains. The author was specifically invited to come along to write about the trip.
The group consists of a couple of wealthy hobbyists who helped fund the trip, some world-class kayakers, a doctor, the author, a filmmaker, and various support personnel ferrying equipment and supplies. The first stretch of the trip was so dangerous that only the world-class kayakers could travel on the river; the others portaged their boats or rode along with the support crew. The author portaged the first stretch writing about the flora and fauna and the people in the various villages that the portaging team hiked through. Once the kayaking team made it past the headwaters the author and the rest of the portaging group joined them on the river paddling their own raft.
This adventure story is different from the others in that the adventurers are not off on their own in the middle of nowhere as they paddled past plenty of towns and villages on the river. The members of the expedition are constantly stopping off to buy food and send communiques back to their friends and family. The trip wasn’t without its dangers, however. A person could easily whack their head on a rock in the rapids or get sucked into a whirlpool and drown. They also crossed paths with some not-so-nice people such as drug runners. Additionally, part of their trip carried them straight through territory controlled by armed guerrillas who shot at them. Conflict was also generated by the team members themselves as months on the river took its toll and infighting and politics ensued as cliques developed threatening the trip, bringing into question whether they would succeed. The author does a great job of narrating the expedition making it clear that it wasn’t just the river with which they had to contend. I really liked this story even though I am not particularly interested in kayaking/rafting.
After completing the third book in the series, I realized that so far, the story I didn’t like was the one written by the explorers themselves. Tip: If you are going to do something amazing, be sure to hire a professional writer to document the story for you – it will make all the difference.
Well, I finished another of the 13 Short Espionage Novels (anthology) stories,
and I think I will take a break from that for a while. The Somerset Maugham story
was the only one that I really liked. This last one, The People of the Peacock, well, I knew how it would
end almost from page one, but sometimes that is OK, if the story has interesting characters,
clever problems, social and moral issues, psychological depth. This one did not.
I found a new anthology. This time, Masters of Fantasy and Wonder (654 pages). I have never much been
into fantasy literature, and most of the authors are unfamiliar, but at least the stories are (mostly) short.
Hopefully, some will be worth mentioning.
Well, I started reading some stories from the fantasy anthology mentioned above.
The Third Level, by Jack Finney (most well known for The Body Snatchers)
involved a man who became lost in Grand Central Station and discovered a portal
taking him back in time to the late 1800s. He returns and discusses the situation with his
psychiatrist. There is a sort of unexpected twist ending.
The Bagful of Dreams, by Jack Vance (one of my favorite writers). It is one of his "Dying Earth"
stories, set in the far distant future where technology and science have become lost arts
and magic has become a presence in the world. The writing is good and the dialogues and situations
interesting, but I think the story was only part of a longer work and it seemed to lack an ending.
Beyond the Dead Reef, by James Tiptree jr. had some nice depictions of a SCUBA diving resort
(I used to dive), but the story, itself was silly, involving sea-trash forming a deadly monster. My
least favorite story, so far.
The King's Bride, by E T A Hoffmann (think "Tales of Hoffmann") was reminiscent of a fairy tale,
full of quirky characters and gnomes, sylphs, undines, a carrot King, a bad poet, an attractive farm girl
and her father who studies mysticism as a life-long hobby. So far this is my favorite.
If you are interested in the different sorts of fantasy, you might want to pick this book up on one
of the used book outlets on line. I will read a few more stories and see how it goes.
It's been a while since I've been to the thrift store, but today was one of those overcast, gloomy, chilly afternoons- so I went.
I picked up two books-
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Other Stories- Barnes and Noble edition (2010) for $2.99.
It's about 21/2 inches thick, cover to cover.
I bought it more for the non-Alice stories- Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection, Lawn Tennis Tournaments, A selection from Symbolic Logic,
The Alphabet Cypher- and things like those that tend to be difficult to find.
Additionally, I picked up a copy of Quantum Enigma by Rosenbaum & Kuttner. It's the sort of book I always buy and then regret buying, but we'll see...
There is a drawing inside where Galileo looks a little bit like Orson Wells.
Epic as @MichaelNadal might say, crispy also. Very well written story about twin brothers. It all starts in a library. We all have a dark half or a shadow self. I am not saying more, because it will just spoil it.
Over the years I had to choose, what to keep and what to let go. Space is always a problem. So, the books that I kept was poetry, dictionaries and gifts. Also different Bible translations and other spiritual texts. I also love my Paul Coelho books.
James J. Rorimer (left) with Renaissance jewerlry recovered from Neuschwanstein Castle
A dry but interesting autobiographical account of Rorimer’s time serving as a monuments man during World War II. Rorimer describes the difficulties of trying to preserve art, architecture, books and libraries during wartime. The book starts with Rorimer’s time in basic training and then on into Europe, following the route D-Day troops took starting at Normandy then on through Germany to Hitler’s retreat in Austria.
The goals of the monuments men (and women) often conflicted with those of the soldiers fighting the war. For example, rules of land warfare prohibited churches from being bombed, but did not forbid snipers from using their bell towers to set up machine gun nests. Needless to say, saving a church wasn’t on an infantry soldier’s mind when he was being fired upon by Germans. Consequently, Rorimer would often drive to the location of a church only to find nothing left but a pile of rubble that had been bulldozed into a bomb crater along with any art that the church may have housed.
Rorimer also met with frustration when careless soldiers caused unnecessary damage to buildings in which they were temporarily billeted during their march through Europe. Additionally, he had to delicately deal with argumentative generals, including Eisenhower, who wanted to decorate their command offices with art the Germans looted and then left behind when they retreated.
Despite the difficulties, monuments men helped preserve fine architecture, caught thieves, and returned thousands of works of art to their proper owners.
Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci. Stolen by Hans Frank (The Butcher of Poland) and recovered from his Bavarian villa. Now in the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow.
Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael. Also stolen by Hans Frank but never recovered.
After the war, James Rorimer went back to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually became director of the museum. He played a leading role in the creation of The Cloisters.
Just recently I began reading The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar-
a Norton Critical Edition.
I didn't know that "fairy tales" and their history could be so complex and meaningful-
through various interpretations and methods of analysis.
Most of the versions of these tales that we know are not the original folk stories,
they are more "sanitized", preachy, moralistic, versions of the "earthier" versions.
Also discussed is the influence on modern writers, and updated versions
by writers like Roald Dahl, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton,
Margaret Atwood, James Thurber...
Walt Disney et al. wanted to make movie and book versions of fairy tales appealing to parents who would otherwise be offended and not want to expose their precious children to the harsh facts of life relayed in those stories. I like that over hundreds of years so many different versions of the same tale have developed - each version shaped by the storyteller and what message he/she was trying to convey. The Norton Critical Editions series is a great source of information and I if I enjoy a book, I often try to re-read it again from that series.
Just finished reading The Anomaly (well, not entirely sure, because we could all be living in a simulation)--terrific read. I'm now about a third of the way through North Woods, which is a marvel of writing. Rec both highly.
It’s months I haven’t finished reading Wind and Wuthering, and I hereby declare that I will not start to read any other book until I haven’t finished reading it.
It’s months I haven’t finished reading Wind and Wuthering, and I hereby declare that I will not start to read any other book until I haven’t finished reading it.
Just finished reading The Anomaly (well, not entirely sure, because we could all be living in a simulation)--terrific read. I'm now about a third of the way through North Woods, which is a marvel of writing. Rec both highly.
In my opinion it is an easier read. I preferred it to Wuthering Heights, but it is a matter of "taste".
And speaking of taste, I would suggest reading something completely different after WH- to cleanse
the palate.
It’s months I haven’t finished reading Wind and Wuthering, and I hereby declare that I will not start to read any other book until I haven’t finished reading it.
Wind and Wuthering ?? Is that a typo, or a sarcastic editorial comment regarding wordinesss? For what it's worth, when I gave up reading what I thought I was "supposed" to read, and starting reading what I wanted to read, I began reading a lot more and have been enjoying a lot more too.
Wind and Wuthering ?? Is that a typo, or a sarcastic editorial comment regarding wordinesss? For what it's worth, when I gave up reading what I thought I was "supposed" to read, and starting reading what I wanted to read, I began reading a lot more and have been enjoying a lot more too.
